ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Instead of thinking about Election Day tomorrow, you could imagine the election in three phases. There's been early voting. About 80 million people have cast their ballot so far. Then comes the blitz of votes tomorrow and, finally, the counting, which could take days. NPR's Miles Parks is here to walk us through what election officials and security experts are looking for in all three of those phases. Hey, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: OK. First, early voting - my understanding is that numbers are lower than during the pandemic of 2020, but still very high historically. What else can you tell us about those numbers?
PARKS: Right. So this is the highest non-pandemic early vote total ever. And most of it is coming from early in-person voting, with Republicans specifically coming around to this voting method after the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, kind of gave Republican voters the green light to start voting this way. The open question here is whether it matters, because this could be a lot of people who voted on Election Day in 2020 who just moved those votes a couple days earlier.
Experts generally, though, are really happy with how voting is going at this point. One detail that caught my eye this week was there was all this concern about how Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago would impact the election. But counties in North Carolina affected by the hurricane are actually outpacing the rest of the state when it comes to voter turnout.
SHAPIRO: Wow, that's really good news. So when we look ahead to tomorrow, how many people are expected to turn out, and what are officials watching for?
PARKS: So even though so many people have voted early, roughly half the country is still expected to vote tomorrow. That could be upwards of 70 million people. And any time that many people are doing the same thing on the same day, there will be problems, right?
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
PARKS: Poll workers get sick. Someone's going to forget the keys to a precinct. I was at a briefing last week, and one election official said, a person will drive into a power line outside of a polling place and lose the electricity. I guarantee it.
SHAPIRO: Somewhere in the country.
PARKS: Somewhere in the country, right? So the question is more, are there trends? One thing I'll be watching for tomorrow is specifically the experience of Spanish-speaking voters. We've seen former President Trump pushing the lie that non-citizens are going to be voting in big numbers this election. And so voting rights groups are really monitoring to see whether those fears turn into voter intimidation at the polls.
SHAPIRO: All right, well, once voting ends, counting begins. And experts have warned that that is a real period of uncertainty, where misinformation can thrive. What's their message right now?
PARKS: Please give us patience. It takes a lot of time to count hundreds of millions of pieces of paper. So if margins are tight, it may also take time for news outlets like the Associated Press to call a winner. And for that reason, when I talk to election officials, they say they're really hoping for the election not to be close. I talked with Neil Makhija, who's the chair of the Board of Elections at Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. And he said wide margins take a lot of pressure off election officials and also leave less room for interference in the process.
NEIL MAKHIJA: What I hope and what my message is in these final days is really to encourage every voter to make their voice heard so that we end up with an election that is decisive, that cannot be questioned.
SHAPIRO: Of course, his home state of Pennsylvania is the swing state with the most electoral votes. Are you expecting some of the more decisive states that could determine which way it goes to tally up their results quickly, or could it take a while?
PARKS: It could definitely take a while. There's some optimism in some states. Michigan, for instance, has made processes a little easier for people to - for election officials to count. But in other places, specifically Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, legislatures - the state legislatures in those places have not changed rules to make it easier for election officials to count mail ballots specifically. So that means results could take a while. Obviously, the polls in those states have also shown close to a dead heat, so election officials are gearing up for a very tense week.
SHAPIRO: As is the country. NPR's Miles Parks. Thank you very much.
PARKS: Thanks, Ari. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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