Election Day 2019: An Overview of Legal and Political Aspects of Early Voting in Pennsylvania and the U.S. During the 2020 Presidential Election

Americans head to the polls Tuesday for an election that has state and local officials across the country on edge as they brace for potential problems at the polls, contentious legal fights over ballots and fighting disinformation about the vote itself.

More than 41 million pre-election ballots were cast in 47 states, and officials are expecting high turnout on Election Day, too, for the congressional, state and gubernatorial contests that will determine control of Congress and state legislative chambers.

Most of the tens of millions who will cast ballots on Tuesday will do so without issue, in an election where early voting has been ahead of 2018 levels.

Beyond the legal fights, elections officials are anticipating possible conflict with election deniers who have harassed and threatened officials over the 2020 election and prepared for aggressive monitoring of the upcoming midterm contest.

State and local officials and voting rights advocates have raised the alarm that the political attacks have sparked an exodus of local elections officials in charge of the vote amid a marked rise in threats of violence against election workers.

As of November 3, there have been approximately 120 legal cases surrounding voting, compared to68 before election day in 2020. Democracy Docket, a liberal-leaning voting rights and media platform tracks election litigation, says more than half of the cases sought to restrict access to the ballot.

In Pennsylvania, some counties are urging voters to correct absentee ballots with missing or improper dates that the state Supreme Court ordered to be set aside, while a federal legal challenge over is still looming. A judge rejected a lawsuit that was filed by the Republican secretary of state candidate who was attempting to throw out votes in Detroit.

Georgia’s Cobb County extended the deadline for about 1000 Absentee ballots until November 14, after the ballots were not mailed out until a few days before Election Day because of procedural errors.

A threatening message toward a government worker is one of 18 referrals sent by the secretary of state’s office to law enforcement about drop box intimidation. A federal judge earlier this month imposed new restrictions against a right-wing group in the state following complaints about aggressive patrols of ballot boxes in the state, including blocking the members from openly carrying guns or wearing body armor.

Counting Subtropean Storm Nicole’s ballots: The battleground in Arizona, Nevada, and the state of the fight for control of the Senate

In Florida, Subtropical Storm Nicole is in the middle of the state and is forecast to bring rain and gusty winds to the state on Election Day, then strengthen to a Category 3 Hurricane and make landfall on Wednesday.

As the votes come in and begin to be process and counted on Tuesday, election officials are on guard for conspiracy theories that often spread like wildfire but are flatly untrue.

New batches of votes were reported late Thursday evening in Arizona and Nevada – states with key races that will determine control of the Senate – but it’s still not clear when enough of the outstanding hundreds of thousands of ballots will be counted to call the Senate and gubernatorial contests in those states.

Vote counting centers in Arizona are working full speed ahead on the tabulation of votes to determine key statewide races. Both Democrats and Republicans are trying to control the U.S. Senate as it comes down to the wire.

Everyone pays attention to Maricopa County because of the close races. Those other states like Florida, those races were blowouts. Gates said nobody is paying attention anymore.

In Clark County, the state’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, there are more than 50,000 ballots still to be counted, Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said Thursday.

Broadly speaking Arizona and Florida have similar deadlines and processing rules for mail ballots, though some smaller regulations and procedures — like the inhouse extraction Patrick described — offer some key differences. Regardless, Florida has become a popular point of comparison for those on the political right criticizing Arizona’s elections management.

Whatever the reason for the influx, though, now election officials have to process and tabulate all those ballots. Democratic and Republican teams will check signature verification and ballots.

The nominees for the secretary of state and governor are taking aim at Arizona’s elections management. Both Lake and Finchem have echoed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

“My Grandpa hated me, but now you don’t have a say,” Gates told reporters at the University of Maryland in 2020

Gates said it was offensive for Lake to say people behind him are slow-rolling when they are working long hours.

Protesters turned out in 2020 to protest, prompting officials to take extra precautions this year. Gates told reporters that there have been threats against the members of the elections board.

“That is now a way of life for me and my colleagues,” he explained. “It shouldn’t be for all the election workers and election officials across the country, but that is now a way of life.”

They would have to stop and think about my grandpa. My grandpa was a World War II veteran who was in Europe,” Gates said. He wasn’t fighting for their right to pick up a phone or type in a text threatening someone’s life. He was fighting for the right to vote and have a say in who leads us. My grandpa would not approve of that.

The state of the house is waiting for mail-in and early ballots: a new look at the House Democrats’ undecidability after Election Day

Control of the House is also still in the balance as ballots are counted in states such as California. The Republicans are inching towards a majority but have not yet secured enough victories to take control, and more than two dozen congressional races remain uncalled.

McCarthy has a team that believes he will be speaker. But conservative hard-liners are emboldened by the likelihood of a narrow House GOP majority and are threatening to force him to make deals to weaken the speakership, which he has long resisted.

The way that each state handles the mail-in and early votes is one of the main reasons the vote count is taking so long.

Although the media calls races on election night, there isn’t a state in the country that can declare a winner on Election Day because they still have more work to do.

In Arizona, CNN and other news networks have yet to call the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters, or the governor’s race between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake.

“We will be working through the weekend and get through most of those ballots – not all of those ballots – probably by no later than Monday morning,” Hargrove said.

There were false claims on right-wing social media that a woman wearing glasses in the counting facility was the Democratic governor nominee and the current secretary of state.

Nevada state law allows mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday if they were postmarked by Election Day. But many ballots now arriving are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.

Jamie Rodriguez, interim registrar of votes for Washoe County, said the county disqualified 400 mail-in ballots on Thursday – about two-thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received – because they were postmarked late.

The Arizona House Freedom Caucus: How voters are coming to grips with a Republican speaker’s bid? CNN’s Tammy Patrick

Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and have begun to lay out their list of demands, CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju report, putting the California Republican’s path to securing 218 votes in peril if the party ultimately takes the House with a slim majority.

House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry met with McCarthy in his office on Friday. Later he spoke about the meeting but wouldn’t say if McCarthy has his support for speaker.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Friday that it was still “too early to tell” whether the race would go to a recount, as the state has to certify the results first. A recount is triggered when the race is less than 1%. If the candidate chooses to pay, it may be conducted.

Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, spent a decade working as a Maricopa County election official, mostly as a federal compliance officer. Half of the voters in the state of Arizona live in the city of Phoenix.

Patrick thinks voters in Arizona have changed their behavior after seeing all the misinformation about mail-in ballots.

Patrick says voters might have heard that voting on Election Day was better if they already had a mail ballot.

Patrick says one thing that could speed up this process is an “extraction” machine. It is much easier to open an envelope with air when there is an inhouse device that cuts the top of it with a laser.

Ultimately, she says that Arizona is under a lot of scrutiny because of the political importance of the outcomes of key races there, as well as how close vote margins are in Arizona. She says because the media feels less comfortable calling the race right now, the perception is that this is taking much longer.