Presidential Election Live Updates: Trump Criticizes Supreme Court
If the final sprint to Election Day appeared superficially familiar, with President Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. making their closing arguments to swing state voters, there were plenty of reminders Monday that the 2020 campaign has been anything but normal.
There were the staggering early vote totals, with a record 97.6 million people already casting their ballots by mail or in person — a tectonic shift away from one-day voting that has been the staple of the American electoral system — and predictions that the total turnout would break the record set in 2016, when nearly 139 million people voted.
There was the legal wrangling that has been a feature of this campaign even before Election Day, with a federal judge in Texas on Monday rejecting Republican efforts to invalidate more than 127,000 votes that were cast at drive-through locations in a Democratic stronghold.
There was the plywood going up in Washington and other cities around the country, amid fears that the passions being stirred up by the campaign could lead to unrest or even violence, and with some states readying members of the National Guard, including Massachusetts, where Gov. Charlie Baker ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to be on standby in case of turmoil following the election.
And there were efforts to set expectations, as the Biden campaign and social media giants like Facebook and Twitter reminded voters that the results of the election may not be known on Tuesday, given the tens of millions of mailed-in ballots that must be counted and the number of key states that do not expect to have full counts on the first day.
President Trump ended the campaign by dwelling on his grievances against his political opponents, the news media and even sports stars as he blitzed from rally to rally and state to state. At a stop in Avoca, Pa., Mr. Trump criticized a recent Supreme Court decision allowing Pennsylvania to accept absentee ballots for several days after Election Day, suggesting cryptically that it could be “physically dangerous,” an apparent prediction of post-election violence.
Later, on Twitter, he complained without evidence that the decision would lead to “rampant and unchecked cheating” and told reporters in Wisconsin, “I hope the Supreme Court has the wisdom to change it.”
Mr. Biden, appearing in the battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania, had a more disciplined closing message.
“Tomorrow we have an opportunity to put an end to a presidency that’s divided this nation,” he said at a drive-in rally at an airport hangar in Cleveland. “Tomorrow we can put an end to a presidency that has failed to protect this nation. And tomorrow we can put an end to a presidency that’s fanned the flames of hate all across this country.”
The coronavirus pandemic, which has left millions unemployed and millions more confined to working or taking classes from their homes, was never far from the surface. Mr. Biden continued to hold what in normal times would sound like an oxymoron — socially distanced rallies — while Mr. Trump continued to flout the advice of federal health experts by holding large events where many attendees packed in close together without wearing masks.
The president held five rallies in four states on Monday, and at each rolled out a familiar list of grievances as well as his familiar rosy predictions of victory. At the same time, his supporters — and those who prefer Mr. Biden — were casting their votes.
In Des Moines, 18-year old Mikayla Simpson stood in line to cast her first vote for president wearing earbuds and a tan Trump 2020 baseball cap. A student at Drake University, she said she was unfazed by the long wait. “I’d stand here all day if I had to,” she said.
In Monroe, Pa., Millie Cooper, 63, a retired health care administrator, dropped off her mail-in ballot and was zipping up her coat against the wind. “I pray Biden wins,” she said. “We need stability, and we don’t have it.”
In Detroit, Gary Bennett, 67, said he, too, wanted to see a change in the White House. Unemployed, but getting by with odd jobs at restaurants and as a handyman, he said he was ready for life to return to normal. He is not a huge fan of Mr. Biden, he said, “but he’s got to be better than what we’re going through now.”
Amid the exasperation and unease, Audrey Haverstock, an administrative assistant at a Minnesota church, expressed a more uncommon emotion: excitement.
“I’m excited for the election tomorrow,” she said. On Tuesday, she planned to put on a mask and vote in person. “I’m not anxious about the election,” she said. “Being anxious doesn’t solve anything.”
On the Trail
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‘Bad and Really Corrupt Publicity,’ Trump Says, Condemning Enemies
President Trump used the first of his five rallies scheduled for Monday to air grievances about polls, the media and the investigation into Russian interference in the election.
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We’ve been under a phony, fake hoax investigation for three years. Nothing but bad and really corrupt publicity from these people. And I say, I wonder what the difference would have been had it been legit — right — had it been legit, and it turned out to be just the opposite. They were the ones that committed the crimes, not us. But I wonder what it would have been — probably would have been a little bit easier. But you know the good news? We’re going to win anyway. And you know I have like five of these to do today, so let’s get going. [cheering] And I appreciate you being here. We are returning power to you, the American people. With your help, your devotion and your drive, we are going to keep on working. We are going to keep on fighting. We are going to keep on winning, winning, winning.
President Trump on Monday attacked the Supreme Court on several occasions during his final full day of campaigning before Election Day, accusing it of putting “our country in danger” with its Friday ruling, which would allow Pennsylvania to continue accepting absentee ballots after Election Day, at least for the time being.
In Kenosha, Wis., the fourth of five rallies across four states, Mr. Trump told a crowd, without basis, that the justices had made a “political” decision that would lead to cheating by his opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. His comments followed an angry tweet in which he charged — without providing any evidence — that the court’s decision would “allow rampant and unchecked cheating” and “induce violence in the streets.”
Twitter quickly flagged the president’s assertions as potentially false, saying that “some or all of the content shared in this tweet is disputed and might be misleading.”
The president’s remarks in Wisconsin echoed his comments earlier, in Avoca, Pa., where he had suggested cryptically that the Supreme Court decision could be “physically dangerous” without explaining what he meant.
Tom Wolf, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, later responded to Mr. Trump on Twitter, vowing that “Pennsylvanians will not be intimidated” and telling the president: “You can watch us count every vote and have a fair election.”
Mr. Trump has for months falsely claimed that mail-in ballots are subject to rampant fraud despite overwhelming evidence that it is not true. In the last days of the campaign, Mr. Trump has focused intensely on Pennsylvania, where Republicans had legally challenged the state’s plan to accept absentee ballots for up to three days after Election Day.
On Friday, the Supreme Court denied a plea from Republicans in the state asking the court to fast-track a decision on whether election officials could continue receiving absentee ballots for three days after Nov. 3. The justices said the court could revisit the decision after the election.
Mr. Trump’s comments about the court came as he made his last pitch to voters. He also spent Monday airing grievances about polls, the news media, former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At his first rally, speaking to a crowd in Fayetteville, N.C., Mr. Trump mentioned the coronavirus only in passing, to mock China, and to call on the governor of North Carolina to open the state. Instead, he began with a lengthy complaint about media-sponsored political polls. The crowd was mostly silent throughout. He finally wounded it down, saying, “I hope I haven’t bored you.”
Pivoting to a familiar litany of complaints, he then derided the two-year investigation into possible conspiracy between his campaign and Russian officials; suggested that everyone in the media, and among his detractors, is “corrupt”; and called his predecessor, Mr. Obama, and his opponent in 2016, Mrs. Clinton, “criminals.”
In Kenosha, Mr. Trump continued to add to his long list of complaints when he was forced to use a hand-held microphone after multiple attempts to fix the one on his lectern failed. “This is the worst microphone I’ve ever used in my life,” he said, clearly annoyed. He promised that because of the audio glitches, he would give everyone back “half of your admission price.
“But considering that you paid nothing,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
For his final rally, Mr. Trump was scheduled to travel to Grand Rapids, Mich.
ON THe TrAIL
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Biden Calls Out Trump’s Record With Black Americans
At a drive-in rally in Pittsburgh, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, said President Trump had done much to harm African-Americans.
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Look, Pittsburgh, honk if you think his commitment of having done more for the African-American community than Abraham Lincoln is true. Honk your horn. Silence. You got it, man. Pittsburgh, honk if you think it’s a bunch of malarkey. You got it. Look, the truth is, Donald Trump has done more to harm Black America than any president in modern history. This is the same man who started the birther movement against my buddy Barack Obama. This the first man, this is the man who when the first Black woman running for vice president, he looks at her and he calls her a monster.
PITTSBURGH — Joseph R. Biden Jr. closed his presidential campaign with a final burst of campaigning in western Pennsylvania on Monday, concluding with a drive-in rally outside a football stadium in Pittsburgh on a chilly autumn evening.
“Folks, I have a feeling we’re coming together for a big win tomorrow,” Mr. Biden told supporters who parked their cars outside Heinz Field.
“My message to you is simple,” he said. “The power to change this country is in your hands.”
It was the second straight day that Mr. Biden held a nighttime rally in his childhood home state, highlighting the critical role that Pennsylvania may play in determining the outcome of Tuesday’s election. And it was a full-circle moment for Mr. Biden, who gave the first speech of his presidential campaign at a union hall in Pittsburgh.
“Tomorrow is the beginning of a new day,” Mr. Biden said on Monday night. “Tomorrow we can put an end to a presidency that has left hard-working Americans out in the cold. Tomorrow we can put an end to a presidency that has divided this nation and fanned the flames of hate.”
Many supporters stood outside their cars to watch the speech in the November cold, some of them waving flags. Others sat on their roofs. Lady Gaga performed before Mr. Biden spoke, and when it was the candidate’s turn, he delivered an emphatic condemnation of President Trump.
He was greeted by a cacophony of beeping horns, a familiar sound at his socially distanced drive-in rallies in the final weeks of the campaign.
Earlier, at a drive-in event with Black voters in Pittsburgh, Mr. Biden forcefully criticized Mr. Trump’s record with African-Americans, mocking him for asserting at the final debate last month that he had done more for the community than anybody “with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”
“The truth is, Donald Trump has done more to harm Black Americans than any president in modern history,” Mr. Biden said, noting that Mr. Trump had pushed a conspiracy about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace and that he had called Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, a “monster.”
Mr. Biden also made a stop in nearby Beaver County, which voted for Mr. Trump by nearly 19 percentage points four years ago, where he appealed to union workers and emphasized his middle-class roots.
“What happens now, what happens tomorrow, is going to determine what this country looks like for a couple generations,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s not a joke. I really, genuinely believe that. There’s so damn much at stake.”
He first traveled on Monday to Ohio, a state that is seen as a stretch for him to win, where he held a drive-in rally at an airport hangar in Cleveland. But he devoted the rest of the day to western Pennsylvania, a crucial region in a crucial state. Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by less than one percentage point, and both he and Mr. Biden have focused significant attention on the state in the final days of the campaign.
Mr. Trump held a rally near Scranton, Mr. Biden’s hometown, on Monday, and Mr. Biden plans to return to the state again on Tuesday with visits to Scranton and Philadelphia, where Ms. Harris appeared on Monday night.
“The power is in your hands, Pennsylvania,” Mr. Biden declared on Monday night.
PHILADELPHIA — Senator Kamala Harris on Monday evening made an impassioned final pitch before Election Day, casting the race as “the most consequential election of our lifetimes” as she urged Americans to turn out to the polls.
“Your vote is your voice and your voice is your power,” she said. “Don’t let anyone ever take your power from you. Now is the time to stand up. Now is the time to speak out. And now is the time to vote and vote like our lives depend on it because they do.”
Standing outside at Citizens Bank Park, and alternating onstage with the musician John Legend, she addressed a drive-in rally in the last hours before Election Day, reminding listeners of the Democratic ticket’s policy priorities — from combating the coronavirus to confronting racial injustice — and calling her running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., “a leader of both strength and empathy, toughness and humility.”
Her appearance capped a full day of campaigning across Pennsylvania, with Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, making stops in western Pennsylvania, and Ms. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, campaigning in the east.
Pennsylvania has emerged as perhaps the most critical battleground state and both presidential campaigns are competing there aggressively.
Pennsylvanians have not hit the early vote numbers of several other battleground states, according to the U.S. Elections Project, and the Biden-Harris ticket made a final push here to urge big Election Day turnout. The Bidens were across the state in Pittsburgh, campaigning at a rally alongside Lady Gaga.
“Let’s vote, and vote with conviction and confidence and hope,” Ms. Harris said. “Let’s elect Joe Biden the next President of the United States.”
A federal judge in Houston on Monday rejected Republican efforts to invalidate more than 127,000 votes that were cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city.
The lawsuit was one of the most aggressive moves by Republicans in an election marked by more than 400 voting-related lawsuits. And it came as Texas, long considered reliably Republican in presidential elections, has emerged as a swing state this year, with polls showing an unusually close race there.
Harris County, the most populous county in Texas, is home to one of the state’s largest concentrations of Democratic voters. It had set up 10 drive-through voting sites to offer a safe, in-person voting option amid the pandemic, and polls were open for 18 days.
But in a lawsuit, Republicans argued that Chris Hollins, the Harris County Clerk, did not have the authority to allow drive-through voting in the county.
Judge Andrew S. Hanen, a federal judge who was appointed by President George W. Bush, held an emergency hearing for the lawsuit on Monday and ruled against tossing the ballots. On Sunday, the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court had rejected a similar effort to get those ballots tossed out.
“We win,” Susan Hays, the elections counsel for Mr. Hollins, said in a text message.
Rebecca Acuña, the Biden campaign’s Texas director, praised the decision. “Make no mistake: This is not a partisan victory,” she said. “This is a victory for voters across the country who are exercising their constitutional right to make their voices heard.”
Hours after the decision was handed down, the Republican plaintiffs filed an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The drive-through voting system was put in place for the first time this year by Mr. Hollins, the top elections official in Harris County, with unanimous approval by county commissioners. In a statement on Twitter on Saturday, Mr. Hollins said drive-through voting was “a safe, secure and convenient way to vote,” adding, “Texas Election Code allows it, the Secretary of State approved it and 127,000 voters from all walks of life have used it.”
Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, hailed the ruling. “The court was right to reject this outrageous attempt to undermine a true and accurate vote count and improperly influence the outcome of the election,” she said.
State Representative Steve Toth, one of the Republican plaintiffs, said the judge ruled that the plaintiffs did not have standing in the case.
The effort to invalidate those votes had been met with bipartisan backlash. Democrats decried it as among the most brazen moves to disenfranchise voters in Texas. A coalition of 150 faith leaders in the state signed a letter decrying the effort. And Joe Straus, the former Republican speaker of the State House, called the lawsuit “patently wrong” and evidence of “desperate tactics.”
Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a statement after the ruling that the suit should never have been brought. “Texans who lawfully voted at drive-through locations should have never had to fear that their votes wouldn’t be counted and their voices wouldn’t be heard,” he said. “This lawsuit was shameful and it should have never seen the light of day.”
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube plan to take a series of steps on Election Day to prevent the spread of misinformation, particularly around the results and the integrity of voting.
At Facebook, an operations center staffed by dozens of employees — what the company calls a war room — will work Tuesday to identify efforts to destabilize the election. The team, which will work virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, has already been in action, Facebook said.
In a Twitter post on Monday night, Facebook said that the team was also tracking “potentially dangerous activity we saw with the swarming of Biden campaign buses this weekend,” a reference to the caravan of Trump supporters that surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas. “We are monitoring closely and will remove content calling for coordinated harm or interference with anyone’s ability to vote,” it added.
Facebook’s app also will look different on Tuesday. To prevent candidates from prematurely and inaccurately declaring victory, the company plans to add a notification at the top of News Feeds letting people know that no winner has been chosen until election results are verified by news outlets like Reuters and The Associated Press.
Twitter’s strategy is twofold. One group of employees will work to root out false claims and networks of bots that spread such information by using both algorithms and human analysts, while another team will highlight reliable information in the Explore and Trends sections of its service.
Twitter plans to add labels to tweets from candidates who claim victory before the election is called by authoritative sources. At least two news outlets will need to independently project the results before a candidate can use Twitter to celebrate his or her win, the company said.
On Monday, Twitter labeled a post by Richard Grenell, President Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, showing Joseph R. Biden Jr. on a campaign plane without a mask as manipulated media. The photo used by Mr. Grenell, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, was from 2019 before the pandemic.
But social media companies had a haphazard response on Monday to a video of Mr. Biden that was deceptively edited to make it appear as though he were admitting to voter fraud, labeling some versions of the video and not others. The video was viewed more than 17 million times on social media platforms, according to Avaaz, a progressive human-rights nonprofit that studied it.
The video was an edited clip from an Oct. 24 appearance by Mr. Biden, on the podcast “Pod Save America,” in which he discussed the Obama administration’s efforts to combat voter fraud and said that he had put together “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”
YouTube said it would be especially sensitive about videos that attempt to challenge the election’s integrity. YouTube already does not allow videos that mislead voters about how to vote or the eligibility of a candidate, or that incite people to interfere with the voting process. The company said it would take down such videos quickly, even if one of the speakers was a presidential candidate.
As the polls close, YouTube will feature a playlist of live election results coverage from what it deems authoritative news sources.
The Trump campaign on Monday threw more support behind Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, who is locked in a tight battle that could help determine whether her party retains control of the Senate.
Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s eldest daughter and a senior White House adviser, traveled to Des Moines and held a rally packed with about 1,000 supporters, while Mr. Trump called Ms. Ernst to encourage her supporters over a loudspeaker in Sioux City.
As Trump supporters crowded into the Elwell Family Food Center at the State Fairgrounds — many of them not wearing masks despite a sign encouraging them to do so — Ms. Trump touted her father’s accomplishments in office. She also singled out Ms. Ernst, seated nearby, for praise.
“With the help of Senator Joni Ernst, we secured the largest-ever increase for child care funding, giving more than 800,000 low-income families great child care,” Ms. Trump said in an apparent reference to Congress’s $2.37 billion increase for child care grants in 2018, the largest one-year increase in federal funding for child care in history, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy.
Hours later, in Sioux City, Ms. Ernst held up her cellphone to a microphone, where the president delivered a message to her supporters.
“I like Sioux City very much. Maybe I’ll move there with you someday. You’re my kind of people,” Mr. Trump said, before congratulating the freshman senator on recent poll numbers. “But the big congratulations comes tomorrow.”
Ms. Ernst and her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield, had been virtually tied in the final weeks of the campaign — a far cry from 2014, when Ms. Ernst cruised to victory, and 2016, when Mr. Trump carried Iowa by more than nine percentage points.
But a survey last week by The Des Moines Register showed Ms. Ernst with a four-point lead.
Ms. Greenfield spent her final night before Election Day at a car rally in the parking lot of a Des Moines middle school, where dozens of supporters honked their car horns loudly as she took the stage. As supporters cheered, she predicted that Democrats would take control of the Senate and pledged to send the current majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, “packing.”
Many analysts believe that Democrats need to gain four key Senate seats now in Republican hands to gain the advantage in Congress’s upper chamber, and few believe Republicans can maintain control should Ms. Ernst lose.
Ms. Greenfield told a reporter she was undeterred by the results of the Des Moines Register poll.
“When I got in this race 517 days ago, we knew it was going to be a tough fight and it still is,” she said. “It’s a donnybrook. We’re just going to do everything we can to make sure every last vote gets in and gets counted, and we believe we’re going to end up on top.”
With absentee ballots flooding election offices nationwide, the officials processing them are tentatively reporting some surprising news: The share of ballots being rejected because of flawed signatures and other errors appears lower — sometimes much lower — than in the past.
Should that trend hold, it could prove significant in an election in which the bulk of absentee voters has been Democratic, and Republicans have fought furiously, in court and on the stump, to discard mail ballots as fraudulent.
In Fulton County, Ga., home to Atlanta, just 278 of the first 60,000-odd ballots processed had been held back. In Minneapolis, Hennepin County officials last week had rejected only 2,080 of 325,000 ballots — and sent replacement ballots to all of those voters. In Burlington, Iowa, the number of rejected ballots on Monday was 28 of 12,310. And of 474,000 absentee ballots received in Kentucky, barely 1,300 rejects remain uncorrected by voters, compared to more than 15,000 during the state’s presidential primary in June.
What is more, in those jurisdictions and many others, voters are notified of errors on ballots and can correct their mistakes, or vote in person instead.
There is no shortage of caveats to those and other upbeat reports from state and local election officials, which are far from comprehensive. In some states, including battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, regulations prevent early processing of millions of mail ballots, and it is impossible to know how many will be turned down.
“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.
PHILADELPHIA — The Biden campaign on Monday moved to set a series of expectations about how Election Day results should be viewed, warning against President Trump’s inaccurate suggestion that states usually finish counting votes on election night and promising to “protect the vote.”
“Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on election night,” said Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign manager, in a briefing on Monday.
“When Donald Trump says that ballots counted after midnight should be invalidated, he’s just making that up,” she added. “There is no historical precedent that any of our elections have ever run and been counted and completely verified on election night. We do not expect that to happen in 2020.”
Running through a Zoom presentation, she laid out the campaign’s expectations for the numbers they believe Mr. Trump will need to hit on Election Day in states including North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arizona — 62 percent, 61 percent and 60 percent respectively — and outlined a series of paths Mr. Biden has to the presidency.
She also stressed that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, three critical battleground states, may be slower to report results.
And she made clear repeatedly that the campaign will not be over, politically or legally, just because Mr. Trump may seek to declare a win early.
Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel who is helping to lead the Biden campaign’s election protection efforts, dismissed Mr. Trump’s suggestions that he will raise legal challenges.
“The case he’s turning over to his lawyers when the voters have spoken is a case that no lawyer can win,” Mr. Bauer said. “And his lawyers will not win it. So we’re going to match them, I assure you, and exceed them in quality and vigor, and we’ll protect the vote.”
Ms. O’Malley Dillon said she expected Mr. Biden to address the country on election night.
“What we’re going to see on Election Day is going to give us a very good sense of where we’re headed,” she said. “My expectation is that the vice president will address the American people. Probably late. But we’re not really concerned about what Donald Trump says on election night or what he might want to convey.
“What he says,” she added, “might have nothing to do with the reality of it.”
Florida and Ohio, two states that President Trump can least afford to lose in his bid for re-election, continued to tilt toward the Democratic candidate, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in two final battleground state polls conducted by Quinnipiac University and released on Monday.
In Florida, a state that both candidates have visited in the final week of the campaign, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump 47 percent to 42 percent, though nine percent of those polled said they were still undecided. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.
In Ohio, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by 47 percent to 43 percent, with eight percent of likely voters still undecided. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
Both polls were conducted by Quinnipiac University and surveyed likely voters from Oct. 28 to Nov. 1.
On Monday night, former President Barack Obama campaigned in Miami for Mr. Biden, whose lead among likely voters in Florida had widened slightly in the new poll. He had led Mr. Trump by three percentage points in a Quinnipiac poll released last week.
In 2016, Mr. Trump carried Florida by less than two percentage points over Hillary Clinton, giving him the state’s 29 electoral votes. Mr. Trump’s victory in Ohio was more decisive — 8.1 percentage points — and gave him the state’s 18 electoral votes.
President Donald J. Trump returned again to the battleground state of North Carolina this morning, addressing a crowd that had almost entirely voted for him already, in a state that has had heavy early turnout.
North Carolina has been processing mail-in votes for weeks, in contrast to another closely watched state, Pennsylvania. Because of that, state officials said Monday that they expected at least 97 percent of all ballots cast in the election to be counted by Tuesday evening.
“Rough estimate, we had roughly 4.7 million voters in 2016, and we’re getting close to 4.6 right now,” Damon Circosta, the State Board of Elections chair, said Monday afternoon. “We anticipate beautiful weather in North Carolina tomorrow and very high turnout, so we’ll set another record.”
At Mr. Trump’s rally at the airport in Fayetteville, Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican facing his own tough election fight, asked the crowd, “How many of you’ve already voted?” Nearly every hand seemed to rise. But even with the vote processing well underway, not every race here may be decided Tuesday night.
The two most closely watched races in the state are the presidential election and the contest for the United States Senate, where Mr. Tillis is in a tight race with Cal Cunningham, a former state senator and Iraq war veteran. The race was upended a month ago after Mr. Cunningham admitted to exchanging flirtatious texts with a woman who is not his wife.
Polls give Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and Mr. Cunningham the edge in those races, but only slightly. Roy Cooper, the incumbent Democratic governor, has a more comfortable lead.
Mr. Trump spent much of his remarks Monday lamenting polls and pollsters, who were included among the grievances he brought up in a speech that also included a blooper reel of Mr. Biden’s gaffes. “We are looking good, we’re really look good all over, in the real polls, not the Fox polls,” Mr. Trump said, taking particular issue with Fox News. “Some of these pollsters work magic, and the amazing thing is they hang onto their job. They do horribly.”
Whatever the outcome, the 2020 election is already one for the history books, with an astonishing 97.6 million ballots already submitted through in-person early voting and by mail — more than two-thirds of the number of votes cast in the entire 2016 election.
As of Monday afternoon, hours before Election Day, with some states still holding early voting, 35.5 million people had voted in person and 62.1 million had cast ballots by mail, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a nonpartisan website run by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who tracks county-level data.
Those numbers represent a tectonic shift away from one-day voting, the staple of the American electoral system for centuries.
And they make it likely that the total turnout for 2020 will break the record set in 2016, when nearly 139 million people voted.
They also create fresh uncertainty for two presidential campaigns facing the prospect of motivating a smaller, more-volatile reservoir of available voters to tap on Election Day itself.
Democrats, buoyed by polls showing Joseph R. Biden Jr. with small but durable leads in battleground states, have focused on turning out Black and Latino voters, who typically prefer voting in person, to offset an expected Election-Day surge by Trump supporters.
Texas and Hawaii have already surpassed their total 2016 voter turnout, and the battleground states of North Carolina, Georgia and Florida have topped 90 percent of their 2016 turnout.
In the 20 states that report the party registration of early voters, the elections project found that 45 percent of those who have voted early are registered Democrats, 30 percent are Republicans and 24 percent list no party affiliation.
Officials with both the Biden and Trump campaigns have viewed the split between early voters and Election-Day voters as highly partisan, with Democrats in most states making up a clear majority of early voters and Republicans, motivated by President Trump’s effort to undermine the legitimacy of mail-in balloting, waiting to show up to the polls.
The Trump campaign continues to wage an all-fronts fight in court to limit the time states have to count ballots, while Democrats, citing the challenges posed by the pandemic, have pressed for more time and for looser scrutiny of ballot signatures that could invalidate some votes.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump falsely suggested that states like Pennsylvania, which can take days to count mail-in ballots, needed to complete vote counts on Election Day. He vowed to mount a legal challenge to the Pennsylvania vote.
“We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” the president said.
Presidential elections always provoke anxiety, but this year’s campaign is closing on an especially unnerving note, with reports of pre-election vandalism, the boarding-up of stores in anticipation of rioting and the specter of voter intimidation.
On Monday morning, officials arriving at the Democratic headquarters in Harris County, Tex., found the locks on the front door sealed with glue, and slogans and blobs of red paint smeared on windows.
In the suburbs of Pittsburgh, aides to Representative Conor Lamb, a Democrat, arrived at their storefront office to a similar scene: It was defaced with a red hammer-and-sickle sign and the words, “Don’t vote! Fight for revolution.”
Police said they were investigating both incidents but had not yet identified any perpetrators.
Throughout the country, business owners and government officials — from the managers of Saks Fifth Avenue to the president’s staff — were bracing for potential acts of vandalism or violence based on the outcome, or lack of an outcome.
On Monday, the F.B.I. confirmed that its San Antonio office was investigating an incident in which a caravan of Trump supporters surrounded a Biden campaign bus on Friday — an act of intimidation that President Trump praised on Twitter.
In New York City, the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, which have wowed tourists for decades, were boarded up on Monday morning. SoHo, where trendy shoppers once flocked to glittering stores, echoed with the sound of hammers. On the sidewalk outside the Disney Store in Times Square, workers attached plywood to the storefront.
The sea of plywood stretched into more modest commercial districts in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and even to Washington, where in recent days the ominous precaution has been evident all across downtown, fanning out several blocks from the White House, spreading around Capitol Hill, transforming the nightlife corridors of 14th Street and Adams-Morgan and reaching up into the suburbs.
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On Sunday, students at George Washington University received an email headlined “We Suggest Preparing for the Election Day Period as you Would for a Hurricane or a Snowstorm.” Reporters at The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau were issued gas masks and orange bike helmets marked “press.” It appeared that nearly every CVS, Walgreens and 7-Eleven within at least a mile or so of downtown was being heavily fortified.
The preparations reflected a broader national anxiety surrounding the contest between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the growing fears that no matter who wins, the aftermath of the election could include violence.
The weekend saw tensions flare up. In North Carolina on Saturday, the police used a chemical spray to disperse a get-out-the-vote rally. On Sunday, cars and trucks with Trump flags halted traffic on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge in New York’s northern suburbs, and a pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond.
States are already on alert. On Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to be on standby. In Oregon, which has seen months of sporadic unrest, Gov. Kate Brown ordered the state National Guard to remain on standby in case violent protests erupt.
“We know that there are some people who might use peaceful election night protests to promote violence and property destruction,” Ms. Brown said Monday. “That behavior is not acceptable.”
NOGALES, Ariz. — When the campaign bus for Joseph R. Biden Jr. rolled into Nogales, Ariz., about a mile from the U.S. border with Mexico, Tony Estrada, the longtime Democratic sheriff here, was waiting.
While national Democrats have invested millions getting out the vote in the heavily Latino suburbs of Phoenix, in Nogales, a city of about 20,000 people, politics is a mostly local affair.
National figures rarely set foot here — except to snap the occasional photo at the border — and Sunday was no exception. From the bus spilled not Mr. Biden or one of his high-profile surrogates, but a handful of campaign volunteers who lined up by the side of the road to wave signs, some of which showed support for the former vice president, while others read, “Vota,” and were adorned with Dia de los Muertos sugar skulls.
Mr. Estrada, 77, is retiring this year after nearly three decades as sheriff, but he’s still out on the campaign trail, lending his local star power to give Mr. Biden a boost in this heavily Latino and strongly Democratic community. Arizona is one of four key states where Mr. Biden leads President Trump, the latest poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed.
While Mr. Trump has moved away from his message of lawlessness on the border, Mr. Estrada said voters here haven’t forgotten his rhetoric during the 2016 campaign about Mexicans being rapists and murderers, and the border being a war zone.
“Obviously the rhetoric is completely off base. It’s a peaceful community. We don’t have gangs here. Drive-bys are very, very rare. Home invasions are very rare,” he said. “Are there drugs? Yes, mostly coming through the ports of entry — a wall won’t take care of that.”
Gesturing toward the border wall that separates the U.S. city of Nogales from its Mexican counterpart of the same name, Mr. Estrada argued that the president had made life more perilous for border residents by stoking fears that damaged the local economy, which depends on tourism and trade flowing freely across the border.
In 2016, Santa Cruz County, which includes Nogales, had one of the lowest voter-turnout rates in the state, second only to Navajo County, home to the Navajo Nation. Hillary Clinton won more than 71 percent of the vote in Santa Cruz County, more than anywhere else in the state.
Celeste Martin Wisdom, a local restaurateur and Democratic organizer, is hoping to increase turnout this year. “It’s a thing in Latino communities — ‘mi vota no cuenta,’ my vote doesn’t count — so we’re always fighting that,” she said.
