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Trump may well win a legitimate mandate from voters in 40 days or Democratic nominee Joe Biden might claim an Electoral College majority that would make challenges to the vote in individual states moot.

But Trump's attitude is causing real harm now, even as Americans in some states cast early and mail-in votes. It is not only raising the prospect of a divisive post-election period in November -- it is making it more likely that Trump's supporters will view the election as invalid and will refuse to accept the result if he doesn't win.

"The President will accept the results of a free and fair election," White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said.

McEnany was effectively establishing a predicate for the President to claim the election is rigged. She also previously advanced the incorrect position that the result of the clash between Trump and Biden would only be fair if it was known on election night.

"The President says crazy stuff. We've always had a peaceful transition of power. It's not going to change," said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska.

"Republicans believe in the rule of law, we believe in the Constitution, and that's what dictates what happens (in) ... our election process and so yes."

"If there's a court challenge to the election, it will be decided in court. And the loser of the challenge will accept the results," Graham said.

There is also a flurry of attempts by Trump's campaign and Republicans to use the instruments of local power to make it more difficult for people to vote. Trump is now demanding that his nominee to replace Ginsburg should be seated before the election in order to help adjudicate the winner.

One weakness of the White House approach is that in order for it to fuel credible legal challenges, there will need to be genuine evidence of fraud in mail-in voting.

On Thursday, for instance, the Justice Department said it was investigating alleged problems with mail-in voting in Pennsylvania. In a highly unusual move, it said nine military ballots were found and that seven "were cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump."

Indeed, Trump seized on the incident, saying the ballots were found in a wastepaper basket.

"They throw them out if they have the name 'Trump' on it, I guess," Trump said.

In the 2016 election, Pennsylvania cast 6 million votes, meaning that the nine ballots concerned here make up a tiny proportion of the total vote on which to base a case that the election is unfair. The US attorney said in a letter to county election officials that it appeared confusion was the cause of the prematurely opened ballots -- the envelopes appeared similar to the ballot application envelopes -- and did not allege any political motivation.

"It's clearly making people concerned about voting by mail, first of all the issue of 'will it be counted,'" Trevor Potter, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told CNN Thursday.

"(It's) questioning the legitimacy ... that's really a PR gambit because legally a vote cast on an absentee ballot by mail is just as legitimate as one cast in person and both have the same security safeguards," the Republican lawyer said.

"This is the way democracy works: no winner is declared until every ballot is counted," Benson told CNN's Brianna Keilar.

"So we are going to respond to that as we always do with facts, data, truth and transparency."

Some voters could be voting earlier because they're wary about the performance of the U.S. Postal Service and want to get their ballots in the mail as soon as possible.

It might not be good news, however, for Trump and Republicans, who are lagging considerably behind Democrats in the number of mail ballots submitted.

The advantage for Democrats comes after they requested nearly twice as many mail ballots nationwide than Republicans, likely the result of Trump's months-long assault on the legitimacy of mail ballots

Several states have changed laws since four years ago to either offer early voting or expand early voting periods. In addition, as expected for months, more people are taking advantage of early voting, particularly voting by mail, amid the coronavirus pandemic.

not only did Democrats request more mail ballots than Republicans, they are also returning them at higher rates.

It's a concern if the pandemic continues to rage and if seniors who had voted for Republican candidates in the past get scared to go to the polls at a time when it's too late to vote for mail.

It's a concern for Democrats because mail ballots are far more likely to be disqualified for various reasons than are in-person ballots

Polling has shown that Trump voters are nearly twice as likely to vote on Election Day than Democrats

The other scenario is that Democrats are just more enthused to vote than Republicans and it's showing up in these numbers

McDonald is among election experts who predicted a historically high turnout presidential race even before votes were cast. He estimated last year 150 million people would vote in the 2020 election, 12 million more than the 138 million in 2016

And in Wisconsin, which starts counting on Election Day, polling places for early voting open Tuesday but already the state is nearing its 2016 early vote total due to a flood of mail-in ballots.

Mail balloting has produced fights over the use of special drop boxes and the need for witness signatures.

Signatures that don’t match voting records frequently get ballots disqualified, according to federal government data.

No, there aren’t any new online-voting options.Claim: People can vote by text message, by email or on a state-run website.Fact: Outside of a small amount of overseas absentee voters, no state allows Americans to vote by email, website or text message.Background: In 2016 and 2018, posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites claimed that voters could cast their ballots through newly formed websites, or through text-messaging services.

No, voting machines aren’t doing strange things.Claim: Voting machines are malfunctioning and causing votes to be improperly recorded.Fact: A handful of voting-machine malfunctions are reported every election cycle in most states. The errors are most often due to mistakes by users.Background: Frequently circulated videos purport to show machines malfunctioning or refusing to let people cast their vote for a particular candidate. A 2016 video shot by a woman in Pennsylvania and posted to Twitter claimed that a voting machine was not allowing her to vote for Mr. Trump. The video, which is likely to resurface this year, was provided as evidence that machines were rigged. But as ProPublica reported, the problem with the machine was user error.

No, ICE isn’t monitoring polling locations.Claim: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be at polling stations.Fact: ICE will not be at polling stations.Background: This rumor has made the rounds for a decade. During the 2018 election, claims that ICE would be at polling stations proliferated on Twitter, making misinformation aimed at suppressing the vote one of the most prevalent forms of misinformation on the platform, according to Twitter.

The vast majority of those untallied ballots are in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and its populous surrounding suburbs

Election staff manually examines signatures not verified by the machine. Later, a review is done to make sure the total number of ballots processed matches the number of ballots received. Once verified, those ballots are counted.

Gloria said he expected the majority of the remaining ballots to be counted by Sunday.

Processing mail-in ballots takes longer but "we haven't had any hiccups, we haven't had any delays," said spokeswoman Bethany Drysdale.

Biden argues that Trump's denial and neglect of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and is getting worse by the day should deny the President reelection.

Counting in midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, where he is expecting to do well, could take longer and lead to the kind of disputed outcome that the President is threatening. Trump has already tried to discredit mail-in ballots, which take longer to count, while Republicans in Texas -- so far without success -- have been trying to invalidate ballots cast at drive-thru sites in the Houston area.

"We feel very confident about our pathways to victory," Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Trump, while trailing Biden, also has a clear, if narrower, chance to get to 270 electoral votes that relies on him sweeping through a swath of battlegrounds he won four years ago with what his campaign promises will be a huge Election Day turnout.

At a rally in Florida on Sunday night, Trump's crowd started a chant of "Fire Fauci" when the President complained that everyone heard too much about the pandemic.

But an air of foreboding is hanging over one of the most surreal elections in modern US history. Reports of delays in the delivery of mail-in votes in several crucial battleground states deepened anxiety over the possibility of protracted legal duels between the campaigns in the event of a close election.

In Texas, the state Supreme Court denied a petition by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru facilities in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that surrounds Houston. Republicans have also filed suit in federal court, which has an emergency hearing Monday morning in Houston.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

"I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that's very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it's a very dangerous, terrible thing," Trump told reporters.

But Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on "State of the Union" that she was concerned that Trump could try to declare victory in her state if Election Day voting tallies showed him with a lead before early and mail-in votes were counted.

He took part in a "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote event at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and then held a drive-in rally. He called out disparities in the impact of the virus on minorities and, in the cradle of the American experiment, he painted Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms.

"Let's not ever let anyone take our power from us. Let us not be sidelined, let us not be silent, there is too much at stake and the ancestors expect so much more from us than that," Harris said in North Carolina.

President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.

The President's maneuvering, as he fights to the last moment to secure a second term, is taking place ahead of a court hearing in Texas Monday morning on a Republican request to throw out 127,000 drive-thru votes in a key county.

Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.

Biden is leading in national polls and by a narrower margin in many key states and has multiple paths to victory.

Trump's route to the required 270 votes is thinner but still viable, meaning either candidate could win.

In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is "rigged" against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.

It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

Some of the most crucial battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, have warned it could be several days before a final result can be declared.

or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.

the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.

Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution

Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.

One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”

Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.

The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.

As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.

At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote

Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.

“I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”

The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.

The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.

Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.

So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”

Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”

Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”

In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”

Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.

voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.

Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”

As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.

But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes

Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.

for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.

Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”

In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.

Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.

One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee

Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.

Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.

This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.

More than 30 states, including some key battlegrounds such as North Carolina and Florida, offer voters who make certain errors that would invalidate their ballots—such as missing or mismatched signatures—a chance to correct them.

That debate, with shades of the battles in Bush v. Gore over the 2000 election, has emerged publicly in the run-up to this year’s Election Day.

But during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, it was clear voters would choose an alternative to in-person voting, and the number of voters by mail soared.

Trump, of course, has since been banned from Twitter by the social media platform.

The November election was ultimately described by officials at all levels as the most secure in US history.

But apart from his own voting habits, Trump has also been contradictory in his pronouncements.

There was a particular surge of mail-in voters in swing states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the system was not used before, and which Trump ultimately lost.

The Palm Beach Post reported that, last year, almost 42% of the 212,914 Palm Beach county voters cast a ballot by mail for the presidential primary elections, and that number “skyrocketed” as the general election neared.

When asked about the apparent contradictions, Trump has implied Republican-led states with existing mail-in voting systems were secure, while Democratic-led states establishing or expanding mail-in systems were not.

And the data suggests that it is Democrats driving the early vote rise. In the 23 states that report ballots cast by party identification, 55% of the returned ballots are from Democrats while just 24% are from Republican and 16% are from voters with no party affiliation.

"Republicans typically hold a slight edge in absentee ballot returns in Florida elections. But this year, there's been a stunning development."For the first time ever at this stage of a general election, Democrats here are outvoting Republicans — and by a mammoth 384,000-vote margin through Tuesday."

According to Gallup polling data from earlier this month, more than 6 in 10 Democrats (62%) said they had either already voted or planned to do so before the election whether in-person or by an absentee ballot. Just 24% of Republicans said the same, a huge 38 point partisan gap that is wildly different than in past presidential elections.

In 2016, the gap was just 2 points: 44% of Democrats planned to vote early as compared to 42% of Republicans In 2012, 37% of voters in each party said they planned to vote early.

The pandemic, which appears to be ramping up again across the United States, has killed more than 219,000 Americans and sickened almost 8 million. Because of concerns about gathering in large groups indoors, many states have changed their election laws to allow no-excuse absentee voting. Trump's reaction to that has been to suggest, with no evidence, that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud and to encourage his supporters to vote on Election Day in person. Which they seem, judging by the Gallup numbers, to be planning to do.

Everyone -- Democrats, independents and Republicans -- who have already voted or plan to do so in the weeks leading up to November 3 are doing so in a national political environment that is decidedly tilted against Trump. Even if the landscape somehow turns for Trump in the next 19 days, he may -- given the avalanche of early votes -- already be too far behind to make it up among voters on Election Day.

In Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, Republicans have fought to prevent the counting of all mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before Nov. 3.

This year, in the face of the unprecedented hurdles to voting introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Scholars, researchers and judges have said for years that voting fraud of any kind is vanishingly rare in this country. That hasn’t stopped Republicans from alleging that it happens all the time. They know that accusations of fraud can be enough by themselves to confuse voters and drive down turnout.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots

That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote. Only then can those who believe in representative democracy for all Americans reset the rules and help ensure that everyone’s vote counts.

He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines. It would mean allowing people with criminal records to vote as soon as they have completed the terms of their sentences.

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act. The first bill would update the old map the Supreme Court invalidated in 2013 and would identify the states and localities that are racially discriminating against their voters today, requiring them to seek federal court approval before changing any election laws.The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.

The House of Representatives passed both of these bills in 2019, with all Democrats voting in favor both times. The Voting Rights Amendment Act got the vote of a single House Republican. H.R. 1 got none.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines. Since the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, almost 1,700 polling places have been shut down, most of them in the states that had been under federal supervision for their past discriminatory voting practices. It’s no surprise that voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.

"Nearly every Republican in this chamber led by the majority leader four years ago refused to even consider the Supreme Court nomination of a Democratic president on the grounds ... that we should wait until after the presidential election because the American people deserved a voice in the selection of their next justice," he said on Sunday.

President Trump is doubling down on claims that the results of the presidential election must be known on election night itself, falsely asserting "that's the way it's been and that's the way it should be."

The decision allows election officials in Pennsylvania to count absentee ballots received as late as Friday, as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3. The president denied that he would try to declare victor

y prematurely.

"I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over," Trump said. "I think it's terrible when we can't know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers," he added.

"If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before [Election Day]. They could have put their ballots in a month ago."

But that's not the way voting in America works.

For starters, no state ever reports its final results on election night.

Delaware, in fact, is the only state that will certify its results within the same week as Election Day. Most states will certify their results in the last two weeks of November, with some states even extending until the second week of December.

Americans are breaking early voting records, with more than 93 million votes already cast. Of that, 59 million mail-in ballots have been returned, with 32 million ballots still waiting to be mailed back, according to the U.S. Elections Project.

Election experts predicted that there would be a large increase in mail-in ballots this cycle because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.

"The counties are staffing up, have a ton of equipment, best practices in place, and are planning, for the most part, to count 24/7 until it's done."

FACT CHECK: Trump Falsely Claims That Votes Shouldn't Be Counted After Election Day

The confusion is of particular national interest given Pennsylvania's critical role as a swing state. Butler County overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, 66% to 29%, according to CNN's election results.

"Regarding mail sorting and delivery in Butler County, the Postal Service is unaware of any significant delays or issues and is in regular contact with the Board of Election as we work to locate and deliver ballots as they are presented to us," she said.

"There's no pile of ballots that have been taken from the Butler County election committee that are sitting around,"

He said officials were continuing to investigate the matter while taking steps to ensure that no one who requested a ballot and did not receive one is left disenfranchised, including setting up a special email address, a call center and expediting ballots to people in special circumstances.

Rising Covid-19 cases in nearly every state add another problematic layer to preparations for Election Day, escalating voters' fears about going to a crowded polling place and potentially threatening the loss of critical polling workers who test positive or have to quarantine.

The coronavirus pandemic led to a chaotic primary in several states during the spring, prompting many states to make major changes to their voting rules to encourage more ballots to be cast by mail or ahead of Election Day.

"Everyone spreading out when they vote has been key to safely voting during this pandemic," Sims said. "We do still expect steady turnout on Election Day."

In Texas, a federal judge set a hearing Monday on a Republican challenge to 100,000 votes cast in Harris County, the Democratic stronghold including Houston, via drive-thru voting centers.

Local election officials are hopeful that all of the early voting will make things smoother on Tuesday, even in places where lines were a major problem during the primary, like Detroit.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at a news conference last week. "Because two thirds of our citizens will likely vote absentee or prior to Election Day, we will see a third of our citizens, probably about 2 million, vote in person on Election Day."

will turnout be significantly smaller than normal because so many voted ahead of time? Or is it merely foreshadowing a record-breaking overall vote total -- and there will be long lines on November 3, too, when voting will take longer than normal due to the pandemic?

The coronavirus pandemic, which took hold in the US just after Biden emerged as the winner of the crowded Democratic primary, scrambled many of the remaining primaries.

many states turned to expanding early voting, some allowing all voters to request an absentee ballot and others moving most of their election to vote by mail

two factors turned more voters to cast ballots early and in person. One was that Democrats began to shift their strategy on in-person voting, encouraging voters to vote early and in-person, due to a higher rate of ballot rejection to absentee ballots. The second was that the US Postal Service began to see service delays this summer under new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor who had implemented cost-cutting measures.

Texas surpassed its 2016 vote total even before the weekend. More than 9.6 million people voted during the three-week early voting period that concluded Friday night, beating the state's 9 million turnout in 2016.

Despite massive turnout levels across the country, there are still millions of mail ballots in the key battleground states that were requested by voters but haven't been returned, according to the latest data from Edison Research.

In most states, information about unreturned ballots is public information, and is mined by political campaigns. Campaigns use this data to aggressively target their supporters, during the final stretch of the race, to cast their vote.

"We are now focused on building a reserve pool of 1,500 workers who can be deployed across the state on Election Day in the event there are any last-minute worker changes or shortages," Michigan Secretary of State spokesperson Tracy Wimmer told CNN on Friday.

In Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids, county elections director Gerrid Uzarski told CNN last week that "some" poll workers were quarantining after being exposed to Covid-19, and would no longer be working on Election Day. On top of those quarantining, Uzarski added that "some" other poll workers have decided that they do not want to risk coming into work on Election Day because of the rising cases across the state.

Many election analysts believe Pennsylvania is the knife’s edge on which the race is balanced, the closest of the three “blue wall” states where Joseph R. Biden Jr., if he sweeps them, has his most likely path to the White House.

A New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania on Sunday showed Mr. Biden with a lead of six percentage points, and a margin of error of 2.4 points.

With more Republicans expected to vote on Election Day and Democrats favoring mail ballots in Pennsylvania, when to count and report results have become partisan flash points. Mr. Trump has demanded, without a basis in law, that the vote leader on election night be named the winner.

there are wide differences among counties, with some not expecting full results for days.

The state’s largest cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, are aiming to report results of mail-in ballots on Tuesday night, according to an aide to a top Democratic official briefed on statewide preparations. But many second-tier counties, including in the Philadelphia suburbs, will be slower. “Erie, Berks, Bucks, Delaware and Lackawanna are real problems,” the aide said. “Their reporting of mail-in votes could go into Wednesday, which will create a lot of election night anxiety.”

“They’ll still be separating envelopes and ballots on Wednesday, probably Thursday,” he said.

Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?

For many, it’s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn’t matter because politicians don’t listen to them anyway.

This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party.

“As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans’ anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with long histories of racial discrimination in voting.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade

Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.

In Nevada, the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party have sued to stop counting mail-in ballots until observers can more closely monitor the signature-matching process.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots.

That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote.

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field — and will not even try.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines.

Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines.

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act.

The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States. Modern Republicans have done it so consistently that in 1982 a federal court barred the national party from engaging in any so-called anti-voter-fraud operations.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980.

Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.

2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with abandon.

All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief. He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

He is only repeating what most Republicans have believed for decades: When more people vote, Republicans lose.

But in 2020, more than 2.1 million Democrats cast mail ballots, compared with roughly 1.4 million Republicans, largely because of a Democratic push to vote remotely amid the pandemic and Mr. Trump’s false attacks on the practice. (The former president and his family, however, voted by mail in Florida in the June 2020 primary.)

And the G.O.P. effort carries risks: Was the Democratic surge in mail balloting a sign of a new normal for the previously Republican-dominated voting method, or a blip caused by the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic?

“So what’s the problem that we’re trying to fix?” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic representative from Orlando, asked rhetorically. “Oh, here’s the problem: Florida Democrats cast 600,000 more vote-by-mail ballots.”

Other Republican legislators echoed language used by Mr. Trump and his allies during their challenges to the 2020 election.“I believe that every legal vote should count,” said Travis Hutson, a Republican senator from Northeast Florida. “I believe one fraudulent vote is one too many. And I’m trying to protect the sanctity of our elections.”

The bill was not without criticism from notable Republicans inside and outside the Legislature. D. Alan Hays, a conservative Republican who had previously served in the State Senate for 12 years and is now the election supervisor in Lake County, told his former colleagues at a legislative hearing last month that their bill was a “travesty.”

“Members, I’ve got no evidence for you on the chupacabra, and I got no evidence for you about ballot harvesting,” Ms. Driskell said. “But what I can tell you is this: that our system worked well in 2020, by all accounts, and everyone agreed. And that for so many reasons, we don’t need this bad bill.”

Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, is counting on a strong early vote to help him flip states like Florida and Arizona that President Trump carried in 2016. But Republicans are banking on their voters to turn out in bigger numbers on Election Day and deliver battleground wins, as they did in key states in 2016.

Though Democrats have maintained an edge in early turnout in nearly every state that has seen record participation, Republicans have been closing the gap.

As the nation enters one of the most consequential weeks for voting in recent years, with swaths of Americans nervous about whether their ballots will be received and counted and others determined to push through concerns about the virus to vote, officials across the country have been mounting a furious effort to shore up election systems that have been pushed to the brink.

Never before in modern American politics has the electorate faced so many unknowns while so many Americans still pushed forward to cast their ballots through the mail and in person.

“We wish we could care about other things in our lives, but right now, politics matter so much, and people are engaged,” he said. Of course, non-battleground states, or states without a competitive statewide race, are unlikely to generate such intense voter interest, and early turnout can sometimes lag for reasons ranging from different start dates to disruptions from a hurricane.

And while 70 percent of those Democratic voters have returned their ballots, roughly 590,000 ballots sent to registered Democratic voters have not yet been returned, along with 360,000 ballots sent to registered Republicans.

n the first days of early voting, some Georgians endured waits of eight hours or more to cast ballots. Yet while anecdotal reports suggested heavy turnout among Black voters, Andrea Young, executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Georgia, said it was too early to tally the percentage of votes by African-Americans because thousands of absentee ballots had not been returned.

In Wisconsin, another battleground state where Mr. Biden has maintained a steady single-digit lead, turnout has approached nearly 80 percent of the 2016 total.

After months of claiming that any election outcome other than a victory for him would have to have been “rigged,” the president used his final days on the campaign trail to cast doubt on the very process of tabulating the count, suggesting without any evidence that any votes counted after Tuesday, no matter how legal, must be suspect.

Both sides expect Mr. Trump and his allies to try again to disqualify late-arriving ballots in the emerging center of the legal fight, Pennsylvania, after the state’s high court rejected a previous attempt and the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

“This is the most blatant, open attempt at mass disenfranchisement of voters that I’ve ever witnessed,” said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has litigated several major cases this year.

The Republican efforts moved to an even more aggressive footing on Sunday, after Mr. Trump made clear his intention to challenge an unfavorable outcome through a focus in particular on the mail-in vote, which both sides expect will favor Mr. Biden.

On Monday night, in an extraordinary moment that encapsulated the tenor of his presidency, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that the Supreme Court’s Pennsylvania decision would “allow rampant and unchecked cheating” and “undermine our entire systems of laws” and “induce violence in the streets,” drawing a warning on the platform that it was misleading.

Mr. Trump has spent the past few years appointing conservative judges, an effort that has affected the balance on several appellate panels that will be critical in swing-state voting fights while giving the Supreme Court a new, 6-to-3 conservative tilt.And he has another wild card in Mr. Barr.

This summer, Mr. Barr made a string of exaggerated claims about the problems with mail-in voting and opened the door to sending in federal authorities to stop voter fraud threats.

That situation has led Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a Democrat, to issue guidance that election officials should segregate any ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. Tuesday.“We made a careful decision to segregate those ballots in part to stave off possible future legal challenges from Donald Trump and his enablers,” Mr. Shapiro said.

“They’ll be fanned out across Pennsylvania, on Election Day, and prepared for whatever challenges to possibly come beginning at 8:01 when the polls close,” he said.