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President Trump and his allies say they intend an aggressive challenge to how the votes are counted in key states, and Democrats are mobilizing to meet it.

Both sides expect Mr. Trump and his allies to try again to disqualify late-arriving ballots in the emerging center of the legal fight,

In the most aggressive moves to knock out registered votes in modern memory, Republicans have already sought to nullify ballots before they are counted in several states that could tip the balance of the Electoral College.

In the most aggressive moves to knock out registered votes in modern memory, Republicans have already sought to nullify ballots before they are counted in several states that could tip the balance of the Electoral College.

In an early test of one effort, a federal judge in Texas on Monday ruled against local Republicans who wanted to compel state officials to throw out more than 127,000 ballots cast at newly created drive-through polling places in the Houston area. The federal court ruling, which Republicans said they would appeal, came after a state court also ruled against them.

In his last days of campaigning, Mr. Trump has essentially admitted that he does not expect to win without going to court. “As soon as that election is over,” he told reporters over the weekend, “we’re going in with our lawyers.”

Early results that pop up shortly after the polls close might look very different from the final outcome, because of unprecedented levels of mail-in ballots and early voting due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As a result, in some of the most competitive states, early results may look too rosy for former Vice President Joe Biden, before falling back down to earth and becoming more representative of the true outcome. In other states, Trump could see early leads that slowly narrow as more ballots are counted.

As absentee ballots get counted late on Tuesday night and bigger cities report more of their votes, or even over the days that follow, the statewide vote count could shift in Biden's direction.

More than 17 million ballots across 44 states and DC have already been cast in the 2020 election, a stunning testament to what could be a a historically high voter turnout fueled by a series of state law changes that allow more mail-in balloting with the coronavirus pandemic still gripping the country.

In fact, in ALL of 2016, just over 46 million votes were cast early -- whether in person or by mail. That means that, even though we are still 19 days from the election, more than one-third (37%) as many early votes have already been cast in 2020 as were cast in the entirety of the early voting in the 2016 presidential race.

On Monday in Georgia -- the first day of in-person early voting -- some people waited in lines for as long as 11 hours to cast their ballot. In Texas on Tuesday, its first day of in-person early voting, thousands waited in long lines to have their voice heard. Early in-person voting begins in North Carolina on Thursday. (President Donald Trump will be in the state to rally supporters today.)

It’s possible that we won’t know who won on election night.

Why? Well, tens of millions of people are voting by mail this year, and counting each ballot involves numerous steps, many of them done by hand. And some critical battleground states don’t start processing mail-in ballots until Election Day or very close to it.

Once election officials receive a ballot, they get it ready for counting. This stage is known as pre-processing, and in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and some parts of Michigan, it doesn’t start until Election Day.

he Supreme Court refused on Monday to revive a trial court ruling that would have extended Wisconsin’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots to six days after the election.

The vote was 5 to 3, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority. As is typical, the court’s brief, unsigned order gave no reasons.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin immediately announced a voter education project to alert voters that absentee ballots have to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 3. “We’re dialing up a huge voter education campaign,” Ben Wikler, the state party chairman, said on Twitter. The U.S. Postal Service has recommended that voters mail their ballots by Oct. 27 to ensure that they are counted.

Republicans in Georgia sped a sweeping elections bill into law Thursday, making it the first presidential battleground to impose new voting restrictions following President Joe Biden's victory in the state.

The bill passed both chambers of the legislature in the span of a few hours

Kemp, who is up for reelection next year, had refused to give in to former President Donald Trump's demands last year that he overturn Biden's victory -- earning Trump's public condemnation.

Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His PowerBesieged on multiple fronts, the governor is no longer holding forth; he’s just trying to hold on.

ret Stephens: I can’t believe I’m saying this, Gail, but Cuomo may make former Gov. Eliot Spitzer look good by comparison. At least Client 9’s behavior was, well, transactional, as compared to Cuomo’s creepy come-ons. And the cover-up of the nursing home Covid death count strikes me as possibly criminal and definitely worthy of impeachment. Especially since he was also trying to peddle a book about his Covid leadership skills while he was busy fudging the numbers.What’s your view?Gail: Have to admit it makes me sad. But the double whammy seems impossible to overcome. If it had just been the sex part we could have had some interesting conversations about what’s acceptable in an era that combines feminism with a fairly expansive view of what people — at least unmarried people — can and can’t do.Bret: “If It Had Just Been The Sex Part” could have been the title of a memoir by anyone from Caligula to Johnny Rotten. Sorry, go on.

ret: My gut reaction to your scenario is that it sounds very “Ooh la la,” like it could be a movie starring Cate Blanchett as Gov. Fatale, whereas Cuomo’s behavior is strictly “Ugh Yuck,” like it could be a movie starring Mickey Rourke. I just don’t think it works in quite the same way.Gail: If young workers in a state capitol started complaining that their female governor was touching them inappropriately, I sorta doubt the voters would see it as a glamorous movie.

Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.

State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.

The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates.

In anxious tones, they ask about all of the election-related lawsuits, ballot deadlines, Electoral College technicalities and state-level hijinks. “People are so nervous, because they think this guy will do anything to stay in power,” he says.

Just 22% of Americans believe the election will be “free and fair,” according to a September Yahoo News/YouGov poll, compared with 46% who say it won’t be.

The President has sown doubt with groundless talk of a “rigged” election and repeated refusals to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed voting procedures, while the charged political climate has focused attention on the mechanics of an electoral system that’s shaky, underfunded and under intense strain. It would be naive to predict that nothing will go wrong.

Armstrong County, northeast of Pittsburgh, is one of Pennsylvania’s smaller counties with 44,829 registered voters. But it is a microcosm of the high tension, confusion and deep uncertainty that have accompanied the broad expansion of mail-in voting this year, during an election of passionate intensity.

With all Pennsylvania voters eligible for the first time to vote by mail, more than three million ballots were requested statewide — nearly half the total turnout from 2016. One in five voters in Armstrong County requested a mail-in ballot.

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.

On the eve of the election, more than 90 million voters have been sent absentee or mail ballots, and 60 million of them have already been returned.

For postal workers there, shepherding the votes is the latest challenge in an already exhausting year.

The U.S. Postal Service is one of the nation’s largest employers, but the pandemic has made the federal workers who are closest to us more remote.

In the final days of voting, the Postal Service is struggling to ensure timely delivery of ballots in parts of key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The percentage of ballots delivered to election officials nationwide in one to three days has hovered in the low to mid-90s in the past week.

According to an estimate by the United States Elections Project, about 29.6 million mail-in ballots are still outstanding, although it is not clear how many of those were never sent back or reflected decisions by voters to cast their ballots in person.

A Florida Senate panel on Wednesday voted to advance a revamped election bill that would ban drop boxes used for mail-in ballots, among other changes, despite bipartisan opposition from local election supervisors.

Committee Substitute Senate Bill 90, approved 4-2 along party lines, would also prohibit anyone other than an immediate family member from picking up a voter's ballot and would require vote-by-mail ballots to be requested each election cycle, rather than every two cycles. It increases the identification requirements to request a ballot by mail over the phone and prevents elections supervisors from sending ballots to voters without a request.

Both Republicans and Democrats repeatedly praised Florida's safe and secure 2020 election during the hearing. Republican State Senator Dean Baxley, the bill's sponsor, agreed with those sentiments -- however, he used hypotheticals to argue drop boxes could be security risks and that his bill would provide a safer chain of custody for ballots, more "guard rails on the highway to make sure no one runs off."

Georgia's state Senate on Monday passed an election bill that would repeal no-excuse absentee voting, among other sweeping changes in the critical swing state.

The legislation, which has been championed by state Republican lawmakers, passed in 29-20. It now heads to the Georgia House of Representatives

Under SB 241, voters would need to be 65 years old or older, absent from their precinct, observing a religious holiday, be required to provide constant care for someone with a physical disability, or required to work "for the protection of the health, life, or safety of the public during the entire time the polls are open," or be an overseas or military voter to qualify for an absentee ballot.

California voters registered with "no party preference" can choose among the Democratic, Libertarian, and American Independent parties to vote for a 2020 primary candidate, its secretary of state announced on Monday.

The Republican, Green, and Peace and Freedom, however, have opted to keep their primaries solely for voters registered with their respective parties.

California holds a "jungle primary" for its congressional and state elections, a system that voters approved in a ballot initiative in 2010. Only the top two primary vote-getters make it onto the general election ballot, regardless of party.

In particular, Philadelphia has been a focus for Trump; four years ago, only 15% of the city's voters picked him. Trump has claimed — with little evidence — that the local election system is corrupt. His critics say the president is trying to suppress turnout in the city.

There have been issues, including technical hiccups on the first day of early, in-person voting. A laptop used to program voting machines was stolen. A reporter for NPR member station WHYY got inside a warehouse where voting machines are stored, although city officials beefed up security after that.

A new state law has made it much easier to vote early and by mail.

The data showed how a single rumor pushing a false narrative could rapidly gain traction on Facebook and Twitter, generating tens of thousands of shares and comments. That has made the misinformation particularly hard for elections officials to fight.

1. False claims of ballot “harvesting”This misinformation features the unproven assertion that ballots are being “harvested,” or collected and dropped off in bulk by unauthorized people.

Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, was falsely accused last month of being engaged in or connected to systematic illegal ballot harvesting.

Alaska may well be the last state to be called, because officials there won’t even begin counting mail ballots, or early in-person ballots cast after Oct. 29, for another week. Mr. Trump will probably win here pretty easily, but Democrats have some hope — albeit very slim — of flipping a Senate seat.

Maricopa will post its next report on Friday at 11 a.m. Eastern. Officials there said they had 204,000 more early ballots to process, and a smaller number of provisional and other ballots.

the race could end up close enough for a recount.

Trump Says ‘Unsolicited Ballots’ Will Be the Cause of Election Night Delays. They Won’t.

But two tweets from President Trump Thursday morning erroneously sought to blame states that are automatically mailing out ballots to registered voters for the likely delays and baselessly stated that the results “may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” an assertion dismissed by elections experts.

There is absolutely no evidence that states that automatically send out mail-in ballots to all voters have had issues with accuracy, and some such as Colorado, Washington and Oregon have been conducting their elections mostly by mail for years.