WaPo:

As Floridians rush to vote in the presidential election, mail ballots from Black, Hispanic and younger voters are being flagged for problems at a higher rate than they are for other voters, potentially jeopardizing their participation in the race for the country’s largest battleground state.Follow the latest on Election 2020

The deficient ballots — which have been tagged for issues such as a missing signature — could be rejected if voters do not remedy the problems by 5 p.m. Nov. 5.

As of Friday, election officials had set aside ballots from Black and Hispanic voters at two times the rate of ballots from White voters, according to an analysis by University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith. For people younger than 24, the rate was more than four times what it was for those 65 and older.

Neal Katyal and Josh Geltzer for WaPo.

WaPo:

For months, Republicans have pushed largely unsuccessfully to limit new avenues for voting in the midst of the pandemic. But with next week’s election rapidly approaching, they have shifted their legal strategy in recent days to focus on tactics aimed at challenging ballots one by one, in some cases seeking to discard votes already cast during a swell of early voting.

“It’s not just the rules anymore,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s individual voters.”

Republicans said they are just trying to make sure the process runs smoothly and the rules are applied fairly, arguing that Democrats have loosened election rules in ways that could confuse voters and invite fraud.

“We have volunteers, attorneys and staff in place to ensure that election officials are following the law and counting every lawful ballot,” Justin Riemer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, said Friday. “If election officials aren’t providing transparency that the law demands or we are unable to resolve disputes over certain ballots or procedures, then we will litigate as necessary.”

But Democrats said there is no evidence that expanded mail balloting and other pandemic-related changes lead to fraud. They accused Republicans of targeting valid votes in Democratic strongholds in a blatant bid to gain an electoral advantage.

BuzzFeed News reports.

NYT:

Batches of ballots that will be counted at different times, depending on the swing state. Twitter gadflies and foreign agents intent on sowing confusion. A president who has telegraphed for months that he may not accept results he deems unfavorable.

Television executives overseeing this year’s election night broadcasts are facing big challenges. And the world will be watching.

“Frankly, the well-being of the country depends on us being cautious, disciplined and unassailably correct,” said Noah Oppenheim, the NBC News president. “We are committed to getting this right.”

In interviews, the men and women in charge of network news coverage — the platform that tens of millions of Americans will turn to on Tuesday to make sense of a confusing vote count and learn the future of their country — made similar pledges.

Patience. Caution. And constant reassurance to viewers about the integrity of the results. “We have to be incredibly transparent all through the night with what we know and what we don’t know,” said George Stephanopoulos, who will anchor the proceedings for ABC News.

To accommodate the idiosyncrasies of this pandemic-era campaign, networks are planning tweaks to the way some election nights looked in the past.

Real-time results will be displayed in the context of the total expected vote, including the absentee and mail-in ballots that will account for a high proportion of it. The usual metric, “precincts reporting,” is tied to in-person votes on Election Day, which producers expect to be potentially misleading.

The “decision desks,” the teams of data experts at news organizations who project results, say they are not competing over who calls a race first. “We’re preparing the audience that this might not be over in one night,” said Susan Zirinsky, the president of CBS News.

And combating misinformation — be it from online mischief-makers or falsehoods from the commander in chief — is a priority, particularly in educating Americans that any delays in declaring a victor stem from care, not chicanery.

Miles Rapoport at TAP:

But one thing we can say with some confidence is that there will be a record turnout in this election. As of this Friday evening, over 86,300,000 people have already voted.  This is measured against 137 million people who voted in 2016, and a Total Voting Eligible Population of 239 million people, according to Professor Michael McDonald and the U.S. Elections Project. While it is too early to say that this extraordinary early vote are new voters and not just the same voters voting earlier, it seems clear that turnout this year will almost certainly be over 150 million votes cast; it could well go over 160 million.

There are lots of reasons for this, but I want to highlight one that is not properly credited. So many people are voting early because people have successfully fought to open the process of registration and voting over the last twenty years, building off the trailblazing work of the civil rights movement. Major expansions of opportunities for people to register and vote were increasingly the norm before any of the adjustments because of COVID-19.

With the next redistricting cycle about to begin, I wanted to note some major developments at PlanScore. First off, the site now includes partisan fairness scores that incorporate the results of the 2018 election. Second, the site now covers state senates in addition to state houses and congressional delegations. Third, Chris Warshaw, a political scientist at GW who’s written and testified about partisan gerrymandering, has joined the PlanScore team. Lastly, and most significantly, the site will soon dramatically expand its “Score a Plan” feature, allowing users to upload district maps for almost all states and instantly have them evaluated along a number of dimensions. Stay tuned for when that feature goes live.