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in terms of when we’ll know who won, there’s a big difference between a race decided by two percentage points and one decided by 0.2 percentage points.

cast before election day — more than three million, according to Gabriel Sterling, a top state election official — should already be compiled, and pretty much all officials will need to do Tuesday night is hit “tabulate.”

That means votes

n an extremely tight race, results could be delayed several days while late-arriving ballots come in. The vast majority of Georgians have to get their ballots in by the time the polls close at 7 p.m.

Under Georgia law, a candidate can request one if the margin is less than half a percentage point.

This past week in Pennsylvania, authorities did make one arrest based on an accusation the Trump campaign first leveled in November. Delaware County prosecutors said a man named Bruce Bartman cast an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name — for Mr. Trump. Mr. Bartman’s lawyer said Mr. Bartman had done so as a misguided “form of protest,” and the local prosecutor said it was nothing more than “evidence that one person committed voter fraud.”

The most thorough debunking of Ms. Powell’s conspiracies came last week in a blistering letter from Dominion that affirmed the integrity of its machines, which has been verified in independent audits. The company demanded she retract her statements and accused her of engaging in “a reckless disinformation campaign.”

In a statement on Twitter on Saturday, Mr. Hollins said drive-through voting “is a safe, secure and convenient way to vote. Texas Election Code allows it, the Secretary of State approved it, and 127,000 voters from all walks of life have used it.”

“My message is simple: Pennsylvania is critical in this election,” Mr. Biden said at a “Souls to the Polls” event at Sharon Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon.

“Every single vote matters,” he added, noting that President Trump had only won the state in 2016 by roughly 44,000 votes. “The power to change this country is literally in your hands.”

“We need to get every soul in Philadelphia to the polls,” he said, urging voters to get their absentee ballots to a drop box “as soon as you can” if they still had one or to vote in person on Election Day. Mr. Biden will also hold a drive-in rally in Philadelphia on Sunday evening.

There are worst-case scenarios, and the President’s conduct has made them less unthinkable than usual. But the chances of their coming to pass are remote. Benjamin Ginsberg, who represented the GOP candidate in the 2000 recount, cautions against hysteria. “The panic seems to me to be way overblown,” he says.

What exactly are the worst-case scenarios? They start with the absence of a clear outcome on election night. Many states will be dealing with a massive increase in mail and absentee ballots, which take longer to process than in-person votes: they have to be removed from their envelopes, flattened for tabulation and checked for signatures and other technical requirements before they can be counted.

Three states loom largest in this concern: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three are key battlegrounds that have made a rapid and politically fraught push to expand voting by mail this year.

Other quirks, like a “naked ballot”–a legitimate ballot that a voter has failed to enclose in the required security envelope–may cause further uncertainty; a Pennsylvania court ruled this year that such ballots would not be counted in that state, which Trump won by just 44,000 votes. It all could add up to a presidential race that’s too close to call for days or weeks.

Current polls do not show a particularly tight race in those states, nor nationwide. And the polls have been far more stable, with far fewer undecided voters, than they were in 2016. Faster-counting states like Florida and Arizona, which have demonstrated the ability to rapidly tabulate large volumes of mail ballots, could well decide the election, rendering any uncertainty in the Rust Belt irrelevant.

The election’s outcome is unclear after days or weeks, and Trump is muddying the waters–lobbing lawsuits, disputing the count, accusing his opponents of cheating and convincing large swaths of the electorate that something untoward is going on behind the scenes.

Even if this happens, experts stress that Trump does not have the power to circumvent the nation’s labyrinthine election procedures by tweet. Elections are administered by state and local officials in thousands of jurisdictions, most of whom are experienced professionals with records of integrity.

There are well-tested processes in place for dealing with irregularities, challenges and contests. A candidate can’t demand a recount, for example, unless the tally is within a certain margin, which varies by state.

“While people may make claims to powers and make threats about what they may or may not do, the reality is that the candidates don’t have the power to determine the outcome of the election. It’s really important that voters understand that while a lot about our system is complicated, this isn’t a free-for-all.”

There’s a legal process to get there. The oft-invoked Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that resolved the 2000 standoff, was decided narrowly, specific to a particular situation in a particular place, notes Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. “These things Trump is saying–toss all the ballots, end the counting–those are not legal arguments,” he says.

Some fear a scenario in which, after weeks of uncertainty, the time comes for states to name electors to the Electoral College, and Republican legislators try to appoint their own rosters, overruling their state’s voters and forcing courts or Congress to resolve the matter.

“It’s unthinkably undemocratic to hold a popular vote for President and then nullify it if you don’t like the result,” says Adav Noti, chief of staff at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. While the possibility can’t be entirely dismissed given Republicans’ fealty to Trump, judges would likely take a dim view of such an effort, not to mention the political storm that would ensue.

The past few years have convinced many Americans to expect the unlikely, haunted by failures of imagination past. But when it comes to post-election mayhem, people’s imaginations may be getting the better of them.

“But by amplifying it as if it’s realistic, you create a very real problem of people not having faith in the system by which we choose our leaders. And that’s really harmful.”

If the final vote tally ends up being close, election experts say that both Democrats and Republicans will likely take the matter to court—increasing the possibility of another Bush v. Gore-style stand-off in which lawyers and judges, rather than the voters, ultimately determine the next President.

They argue that making it easier to apply for, vote, deliver, and count mail ballots facilitates fraud, thereby diluting the votes of those who play by the rules. So far, the rival teams appear to be in a dead heat. “Depending on the week, you may say it’s a very good Democratic week or a very good Republican week,” says Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford Law Professor.

Nearly every time states have implemented a change, it’s been followed by a lawsuit. There have been at least 380 election-related lawsuits solely stemming from the pandemic, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.

To the extent that it can be simplified, this year’s election-related legal brawls can be distilled into two groups: a push to eliminate expanded mail-in voting policies on the basis that they would produce unprecedented fraud, and a push to ease the restrictions already in place.

Similar examples of litigation whiplash have played out across the country—each time banking a victory for the GOP.

Progressive watchdogs also point to another factor. Since taking office, Trump has appointed 53 appellate court judges, according to July data from the Pew Research Center, most of whom are reliably conservative and tend to sympathize with the Republicans’ legal positions.

Both Republicans and Democrats are actively preparing for the possibility of a pitched, multi-front court battle after Nov. 3. “We have been planning for any post-election litigation and recounts for well over a year and are extraordinarily well-positioned,”

Any post-Election Day litigation is most likely to involve swing states, crucial to determining the Electoral College winner, that end up having tight vote counts. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina are all high on the list of possibilities, and top election officials in these states are girding for battle.

Many police officials and extremism experts said that they were more worried about the period after Nov. 3, especially if no clear winner emerges.

In Chicago, days off have been canceled and officers notified that their shifts might extend to 12 hours.

National Guard units were also being called out in various states, including New Jersey, Wisconsin and Texas. Officials in the first two said the dearth of poll-station volunteers amid the pandemic meant a few hundred troops in civilian clothing would be needed to help count absentee ballots and other poll activities.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

Republicans are now hoping for a favorable ruling at the federal level, where a judge has called an election-eve hearing for Monday.

Vehicles bearing Trump flags halted traffic on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey; local officials said the motorcade backed up traffic for several miles. In Georgia, a rally for Democrats that had been scheduled was canceled, with organizers citing worries over what they feared was a “large militia presence” drawn by Mr. Trump’s own event nearby.

there were more than 350,000 absentee ballots that had been requested by Democratic voters that had yet to be returned.

“Souls to the Polls”

he F.B.I. was investigating the incident that “in my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,”

Of the three big Northern swing states Mr. Trump won by a hair four years ago, the once reliably blue state of Pennsylvania is the one his advisers believe is most likely within his reach. That’s in large part because of the support of rural voters and Mr. Biden’s call for eventually phasing out fossil fuels, an unpopular stance for many voters in a state with a large natural gas industry.

Mr. Trump entered the final hours of the race in a worse position here than he was four years ago, when Pennsylvania was seen as Hillary Clinton’s firewall.

That lead, however, isn’t enough to make Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans feel fully confident about the state of the race in Pennsylvania. Some of the president’s opponents in recent days have been worried about turnout in the state's rural counties, as well as calls about requested ballots that never arrived.

Pennsylvania’s economy is emerging from the pandemic recession but still has a long road ahead to its pre-crisis state. Like the nation, it has seen a two-track recovery that has left small businesses and low-earning workers behind.

Pennsylvania saw its unemployment rate fall to 8.1 percent in September, according to the Labor Department, nearly identical to the national rate of 7.9 percent. That is a significant improvement from the 16.1 percent unemployment it posted in April. But the state still had 380,000 fewer jobs in September than it did in September of 2019, and there are 18 percent fewer small businesses open here compared to a year ago, according to data compiled by the economists at Opportunity Insights.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, election officials can't do anything with early ballots until Election Day

The Election Day vote is expected to look better for Trump than the early vote in part because Democrats have encouraged their voters to utilize mail-in, absentee and early voting options.

Trump is betting the votes cast on Election Day will look better for him.

a disproportionate amount of early results will be from day-of votes, likely giving Trump an extra bump.

Democrats have improved their vote totals as more votes were counted. That happened in 2016, when Clinton's popular vote margin grew as more mail-in ballots were counted

If there's a disputed election and a state can't determine who should win its electoral votes, expect a court battle, like the one that made George W. Bush president in 2000.

In this way the US election is really 51 smaller elections. And each state has its own rules.

Each state and Washington, DC, all have at least three and as many as 55 votes (that's California).

According to CNN's electoral map, there are 125 electoral votes already safely in Trump's column.

Polling suggests he's in the lead in the Rust Belt sates that put Trump over the hump in 2016. He needs to hold the Rust Belt states.

If Trump wins Florida, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio along with Pennsylvania, Maine's second congressional district and Nebraska's second congressional district, both candidates will have 269 electoral votes.

. Trump probably has an edge in a tie since Republicans control more state congressional delegations.

Nebraska and Maine each award two electoral votes to the statewide winner and the rest of their votes proportionally to the presidential candidate who gets more votes in individual congressional districts

The real question is whether Republicans can hang onto their slim majority in the Senate.

They're pretty much guaranteed to lose a Senate seat in Alabama, so Democrats are looking for 4-5 seats elsewhere. There are plenty of opportunities.

Control of state governments is more important this year than usual since it's a Census year

Even if Democrats don't win the Texas electoral votes, they're hoping to get a say in how the state draws these districts.

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.

"Now, I don't know if that's going to be changed, because we're going to go in the night of -- as soon as that election is over, we're going in with our lawyers. But we don't want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor -- a very partisan guy -- and we don't want to have other states -- like Nevada, where you have the head of the Democratic clubhouse as your governor.

we're doing great in Nevada. We're doing great in Arizona. We're doing great all over. But if you take Nevada or Pennsylvania -- and everyone knows what happens in Philadelphia. You don't have to say it. But I've read about it for years. And I don't think it's fair that we have to wait a long period of time after the election.

It's not entirely clear what Trump is talking about here

Presumably that means a cadre of Trump's attorneys will descend on, say, Pennsylvania and attempt to shut down any further counting of votes beyond Tuesday night. Of course, that is a) completely undemocratic and b) very unlikely to succeed given the Supreme Court ruling that allows absentee ballots received for several days after Election Day to be counted.

The only way that I can see that such a legal move might work is if Trump and his lawyers find actual evidence of widespread voter fraud

what is Trump up to here? Intimidation, pure and simple. He is trying to work the refs in advance of the big game.

"If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electorals, somewhere in that range, and then they're going to try to steal it back after the election."

Nope! Votes counted after Election Day, as long as they have been cast within the legal parameters of their state, are just as above-board as votes cast early or votes cast on Election Day.

Is it true? Absolutely not. Is it dangerous? 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The Working Families Party, aligned with high-profile progressives, such as New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is battling on behalf of liberal candidates in contests that will decide who holds positions as sheriffs and prosecutors.

"We're going from protests to the polls," Angela Angel, a former Maryland state legislator who is a senior adviser to the new Black Lives Matter PAC, told CNN. "We understand in this moment that the real power is in exercising our right to vote."

the group has targeted young voters in more than a dozen key states with a particular focus on reaching people who had requested absentee ballots but had not yet returned them.

In Georgia, a traditionally red state now in play in this year's presidential and US Senate elections, the Black Lives Matter PAC is backing Joyce Barlow, a Democrat running for the Georgia House of Representatives to represent a swath of rural southwest Georgia.

A study released earlier this year by the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina's Law School at Chapel Hill examined more than 2,300 prosecutors' races around the country and found contested elections in fewer than 700 -- or less than a third -- in either the primary or general election.

The groups engaged in electoral politics include Black Lives Matter, the sprawling social justice organization closely associated with this year's protests.

Tuesday's election "isn't just about the presidency. Your money, your minimum wage is on the ballot."

"We saw that very different outcomes were realized by Black people killed by police violence, based on the prosecutors elected in their jurisdictions," said Arisha Hatch, who oversees the Color of Change PAC.

Taylor's mother has sought the appointment of an independent prosecutor to handle the case. In September, Cameron announced that a grand jury indicted one former Louisville Metro Police Department Detective Brett Hankison, with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment in connection with his actions on the night of the raid.

But the Color of Change PAC and other liberal groups are putting their political muscle into local prosecutors' races around the country

In Florida, meanwhile, the PAC is urging a "yes" vote on Amendment 2, which would phase in a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the Sunshine State by 2026.

Rural counties might lack enough lawyers to mount a challenge to an incumbent. Prosecutor elections don't generate much attention. And voters don't always understand the power local county and district attorneys wield.

The Working Families Party mailers in the race tout Rucker's opposition to cash bail for non-violent offenses. "People shouldn't be sitting in jail because they can't afford to not be there," Rucker said in an interview with CNN.

The Working Families Party's "people's charter" calls to "shift resources away from policing, jails and detention centers" and into schools, housing and jobs programs.

Many experts feared that rejection rates would mushroom even more as mail voting reached new highs this fall. Instead, it appears that many voters have risen to the challenge.

“Historically, you’ve seen about 1 percent of ballots get bounced for one reason or another, mostly because of lateness,” said Nate Persily, a Stanford University professor of law and an expert on election administration. “But people are more attuned to the deadline this year, and voters are more aware of the criteria for casting absentee ballots.

“We’ve added so many layers of security to the system that redundancies built in in the ’60s and ’70s, we don’t need any more,” Jared Dearing, the director of the Kentucky Elections Commissions, said last week. Even those voters whose ballots are rejected, he said, are automatically notified by email within an hour.

Election officials also say many voters appear more motivated to cast ballots this year,

It is not only voters who are more aware of the potential pitfalls in voting by mail. Voting officials also have come to recognize that a high rejection rate could have real-world consequences in a close election.

In every county, we’re having massive efforts on the ground” to fix ballot mistakes, Mr. Smith said. “And we have never seen anything like that in any previous election

In some other states, voters who make mistakes are simply out of luck. Only 18 states require that voters be notified if their ballot has a missing signature or a signature discrepancy, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“If election officials and voters are able to vote by mail in such high numbers, yet see so few ballots rejected during a pandemic, that will have been one of the great accomplishments in American democracy,”

Americans are simply growing bored with The Trump Show.

Mr. Trump is known for his sexist remarks, and the clips the ad shows are real. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, has long styled himself a champion of women. He still refers to the Violence Against Women Act as his proudest legislative achievement and he said months before he selected Ms. Harris as his running mate that he would name a woman to his ticket.

President Trump’s rude and demeaning comments to and about women are no secret. Just last week, he called Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, a “monster.” A new ad from the Lincoln Project urges voters to consider what it would be like to have a different kind of president — a man, it suggests, who actually respects women.

The 90-second ad opens with two directives: “Imagine a young girl looking in the mirror, searching for role models in the world to give her hope that one day she, too, can make a difference. Now imagine how she feels when she watches women being verbally attacked.” Cue a series of clips that show Mr. Trump belittling women, including female reporters. “Your daughters are listening,” the ad says.

North Carolina may have broken a record for first-day, early-voting turnout on Thursday, when more than 333,000 people showed up in person to cast their ballots, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The forums replaced what was to be the second debate between the two candidates, after Mr. Trump rejected the decision by the Commission on Presidential Debates to hold the debate virtually because of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis.

Mr. Trump also all but confirmed that he owed about $400 million to creditors, as reported in a New York Times investigation about his taxes.

Over on ABC News, at a very different octane and a very different volume, Mr. Biden answered policy questions from George Stephanopoulos.

Mr. Biden’s outing was not completely easy. He again dodged a question on expanding the Supreme Court if he gets elected, though he did say, that he would offer an answer before Election Day but wanted to see how the nomination process for Judge Amy Coney Barrett plays out first.

Mr. Biden also made some news, saying that his support of the 1994 crime bill — which has been blamed for the large-scale incarceration of Black people — was a “mistake,”

National polls released on Thursday showed Mr. Biden up by an average of more than 10 points.

The venerable NBC/WSJ poll did show Mr. Biden’s lead dropping from 14 points, right after the Sept. 29 debate, to 11 points.

In Arizona, for instance, two new polls found Mr. Biden ahead by four points and one found Mr. Trump ahead by one point.

But in several other swing states, Mr. Biden continues to retain comfortable leads.

He also dodged repeated questions about whether he had a negative coronavirus test immediately before the first presidential debate.

Mr. Biden got his numbers wrong on troop levels in Afghanistan relative to when he left office four years ago and mischaracterized an element of the Green New Deal, but generally avoided clear misstatements.

That day, Nov. 3 this year, instead represents the end of a six-week sprint during a record number of Americans cast their ballots in advance.

In an effort to make polling places less crowded on Election Day, many states have encouraged absentee voting, opened more in-person early-voting sites and, in a few cases, mailed ballots to all registered voters.

While the long lines were a vivid symbol of longstanding efforts to make voting more difficult — particularly for people of color — they also demonstrated the intensity of the desire to vote in an election that millions of Americans have waited for since the last one,

Yet the voters keep coming, intent on exercising a constitutional right and in hopes of shaping a better future for their country.

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.

But early returns will not say much, because the polls will be open for another hour in parts of western Kentucky and Indiana that are on Central time.

Florida and Georgia are expected to count ballots faster than other swing states — Florida especially so — and if Mr. Biden wins either of them, he will be in a formidable position.

If Mr. Trump wins them, then we may be looking at a long wait for results in the Midwest to decide the race.

orth Carolina and Ohio are key presidential swing states, but while they are expected to report a majority of results quickly, they will also continue to accept mail-in ballots for more than a week. That means in a close race, we might not know who won until mid-November.

The last polls in Florida close at this time, as do all or most polls in three other important swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Michigan and Pennsylvania may take several days to count mail ballots, and the returns there on election night may be disproportionately Republican.

There won’t be much to see at the statewide level in Arkansas, which is safe Republican territory for both Mr. Trump and Senator Tom Cotton.

Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota and Wisconsin are the states in play here. Arizona, Minnesota and Wisconsin will be closely watched in the presidential race, and Democrats are hoping to flip Senate seats in Arizona and Colorado.

None of the states with polls closing this time have competitive presidential or Senate races.

There is probably nothing to watch in Alaska or Hawaii on election night. Hawaii will report its results very quickly but does not have any competitive races. And while Alaska’s Senate and House races may be competitive, the state will not start — you read that right, start — counting absentee ballots until Nov. 10.

Exit polls, as we wrote back in 2018, serve a couple of different purposes. While they’re not foolproof, in the days to come, they’ll help provide a sense of how and when voters made up their minds. 

Exit polls were not, however, designed to help give the American public a sneak peek of who’s likely to win, especially when people are still in the process of voting.

It’s just really hard to know in advance what the proportion of in-person Election Day voters and absentee voters will be in 2020,” they added. “This election night especially, it’s best just to wait for the final results — even if it takes a while.”