Local officials in Texas say they plan to fight Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to limit the number of places where voters can hand deliver mail-in ballots.

Abbott announced the order Thursday, the same day local election officials opened the drop-off sites.

Starting Friday, Abbott said in a statement, “mail ballots that are delivered in person by voters who are eligible to vote by mail must be delivered to a single early voting clerk’s office location as publicly designated by a county’s early voting clerk.”

Abbott said the order was an effort to enhance “ballot security protocols” for mail-in ballots, though he offered no evidence having multiple sites would affect the security of these ballots.

“The State of Texas has a duty to voters to maintain the integrity of our elections,” Abbott said in his statement. “As we work to preserve Texans’ ability to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic, we must take extra care to strengthen ballot security protocols throughout the state. These enhanced security protocols will ensure greater transparency and will help stop attempts at illegal voting.”

In Travis County, home to the state capital of Austin, county clerk Dana DeBeauvoir had set up four sites for voters to hand deliver their ballots. She called the order “most unfortunate” and said she plans to “challenge the governor” and his effort to close three of those sites.

“I don’t know what is going to happen to the governor’s order until we get to the point that I can talk about it in court,” she said. “In the meantime, I am still going to listen to what the county attorney tells me is the appropriate thing for the county clerk to do. And that is what we will follow.”

Harris County, home to Houston, planned 12 ballot drop off sites. County Clerk Chris Hollins, a Democrat, says the change will “result in widespread confusion and voter suppression.”

While most states have made it easier to vote by mail this year amid the pandemic, Texas has held out and stuck with some of the most stringent rules for getting an absentee ballot in the country. Still, an unprecedented number of Texans are expected to vote by mail, particularly those who are disabled, over 65 or in one of the other limited categories the state allows.

In past presidential elections, DeBeauvoir said, her office received an average of 27,000 applications for mail-in ballots. So far this year, it has received 71,000 applications, she said.

Concerns over potential USPS issues handling the increase in mail-in ballots forced local election officials in populous counties to come up with more options for people planning to vote by mail in the upcoming election.

These hand-delivery sites, or in-person drop-off sites, were among the solutions.

DeBeauvoir said Abbott’s sudden disapproval of these sites is “targeted” at urban counties, which tend to be heavily Democratic.

“This is a deliberate attempt to manipulate the election,” she said. “If the governor was truly worried about this, he could have stopped this program more than a month ago or contacted the urban counties that are all doing the same thing Travis County is doing.”

In response to the governor’s order, Texas Democrats called Republicans “cheaters.”

“Republicans are on the verge of losing, so Gov. Abbott is trying to adjust the rules last minute,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. “Governor Abbott and Texas Republicans are scared. We are creating a movement that will beat them at the ballot box on November 3, and there’s nothing these cheaters can do about it.”

While the state has long been a Republican stronghold, polls show the race between President Trump and Democrat Joe Biden to be extremely close. Democrats are hoping to make substantial gains in both U.S. House and state legislative races this fall.

Austin’s lone Democratic congressman, Lloyd Doggett, called Abbott’s order an “outrageous act of voter suppression” aimed at affecting the election.

“This sabotage is not about election security,” he said in a statement, “it is about Republican political insecurity. With over a month to return your ballot, voting by mail remains the safest way to participate.”

Houston Public Media reporter Andrew Schneider contributed to this story.

In the first presidential debate, President Trump was asked if he would refrain from declaring victory until the election has been independently certified. He refused to make that commitment.

Atlantic writer Barton Gellman was not surprised.

“That’s a man who won’t leave,” Gellman says. “There are many aspects of his past behavior and, frankly, his pathology that lead me to think this is an immutable decision on his part.”

Gellman writes about the 2020 presidential election — and how he thinks it could trigger a constitutional crisis — in his latest article for The Atlantic. He notes that typically elections are ended when one candidate concedes to the other. It’s a system, he says, that “presumes good behavior and presumes that a rational and well-meaning candidate will accept reality when it comes.”

But Gellman does not trust a scenario that relies upon good faith from the president: “Trump is making as absolutely plain as he can that he will fight the mail vote, that he will try to get the vote count stopped, and that he will not accept any result that is not a victory for him.”

At a rally over the weekend, Trump mocked the media for raising alarms about his earlier answer to a question about a peaceful transfer of power after the election. “Then they say, ‘He doesn’t want to turn over government’ — of course I do. But it’s got to be a fair election,” he said, before repeating unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud.

Gellman says if the election is close, it could take weeks to determine the results in key battleground states as mail-in ballots are scrutinized for technical flaws and counted. If the president cries fraud and his supporters take to the streets, state legislatures could resolve to set aside the popular vote in their states and choose their own partisan delegations to the Electoral College.

While officials are preparing for a worst-case scenario, many believe the casting and counting of ballots will proceed normally, albeit more slowly, on election night.

“This is not going to be a normal election,” Gellman says. “I think that preserving its legitimacy is going to take extra effort this year. Democrats are certainly aware of Trump’s proclivities. They’re certainly concerned about possibilities that he will cheat or try to hang on to power by means other than winning the most votes and counting all the votes. Trump has made it absolutely crystal clear that he does not want all the votes to be counted.”

Interview Highlights

On a common misconception regarding Trump’s threat to refuse to concede

It’s a subtle difference, but an important one: The usual way people say it is that they fear that Trump will refuse to leave the White House if he loses. He’ll refuse to give up the reins of power. And Joe Biden says, well, that’s an easy one. If he loses and he stays there, someone will evict him. That will most likely be the Secret Service or the military. They’ll say, “Excuse me, sir, but your lease has expired on this office. It’s 12:01 on Jan. 20, and we’re going to now assist you in departing.” That works if there is a clear winner or loser.

The greater danger is that Trump is capable of using the powers of the presidency, and the powers of his invincible decision not to concede, to raise doubt whether a winner or loser has yet been established — that he can prevent the achievement of a decisive outcome, which is a far greater risk to the American system.

On the fact that mail-in ballots skew in favor of Democratic candidates

It is true that for about 20 years now, the so-called overtime count, which is the count of the late reporting precincts, the provisional ballots and the mail-in or absentee ballots, that overtime count has shifted towards Democrats for reasons that are not entirely explained by the literature, but are technical ones. … Trump has accentuated that this year by signaling to Republicans that he’s against mail-in ballots and that they’re corrupt, and by signaling to Republicans as well that the COVID pandemic is not as serious as the scientists say it is. And so Democrats, concerned about their health, are intending to use mail ballots at much higher rates than Republicans are, because Republicans have been pushed away deliberately by Trump from the mail-in ballots. So that now a mail-in ballot by proxy is likelier to be a Democratic ballot, because of underlying circumstances and because of Trump’s shaping of the electorate. So his lawyers will know that if they are stopping the count of mail ballots, they are, on balance, almost certainly helping the president.

On how some states have to wait to process mail-in ballots until Election Day

Some [states] say Election Day morning. Some [state laws] even say … they can’t start until Election Day evening. And it has been part of the Republican litigation strategy in 41 states over the past year to prevent state law from allowing more time in advance of the election to open the early arriving ballots.

So the Trump campaign has actually helped make it less likely that those ballots will be counted on time on election night, because if they said you could start two weeks earlier … if the administrators could do all the verification and simply leave them ready to feed into the machine for counting, they could do that as they came in, as they can, for example, in Florida, because of state law there. … The Florida vote is expected to be pretty well-known by the end of election night, because Florida will have presorted all the mail-in ballots. That’s what state law says there. But the Trump campaign has opposed that method when other states have proposed to change it right now.

On how representatives might go about challenging mail-in ballots

Both Democrats and Republicans are allowed to have a representative at the time that these ballots are processed. The Republican strategy is going to be to challenge each and every mail in-ballot if they can find any reason at all to do so. And so the administrator will pull out one ballot from this, this pile of hundreds of thousands in any given state, or millions given the state, and they’ll do this by county, I suppose. And the Republican representative will say “Object. Signature doesn’t match.” And then everyone will sort of squint over the squiggly lines [and], without the benefit of any expert training, have to try to decide is that signature a good match or not a good match? “That postmark is illegible. You can’t prove that it was mailed in time.” So I think you may see postmarks or missing postmarks or poorly printed postmarks becoming the new sort of hanging chads of this election. That’s the way the vote-by-vote challenge is going to go.

On both parties being ready for litigation

The two sides have each hired hundreds of lawyers and recruited thousands of lawyers as volunteers for what they believe is going to be a multistate cluster of litigation on the scale that took place in Florida in 2000, which was monumental. That was one state. The expectation is that there could be several states on which the result hinges and the vote is close, and the margin of litigation is sufficient that both sides are going to pour in all the effort they can in litigating the rules and the vote count.

On the Republican side being free of court supervision for the first time since 1981

This is the first time in 40 years that we’re going to have a presidential election without a court supervising the Republican “ballot security operations” on Election Day. Republicans were caught doing all kinds of voter suppression and intimidation in 1981, and a lawsuit against the Republican National Committee placed the RNC under a consent decree, a court order, that forbade it to use many methods of voter purging, voter intimidation. The Republicans had rounded up large numbers of law enforcement and former military people wearing armbands and guns, carrying radios, confronting voters and demanding evidence of their right to vote, warning them that it’s a felony to vote when you’re not eligible in the correct neighborhood, confronting poll workers who tried to help voters as they’re legally allowed to do. This was in New Jersey, but it was a nationwide consent decree. And the methods that had been used in New Jersey were widely known methods and had been used for decades to suppress, in particular, the votes of people of color in this country. …

And there was a consent decree here that lasted for decades, and it expired in 2018. And this time the Election Day operations of the Republican side are going to be free of court supervision. They’re going to be able to decide for themselves how they operate that day, and maybe they’ll be sued after the fact, but it will be too late to make much difference in terms of the outcome. The Trump campaign is recruiting what it’s calling “an army for Trump.” The president’s son [Donald Trump Jr.] has gone on television calling for “all able-bodied men and women” — Why able-bodied? What kind of physical confrontation does he have in mind at the polls? — “all able-bodied men and women to stop the election from being stolen by Democrats.”

On some of the other ways Trump might contest results

I think there’s reasonable concern that when the president and his son are using the rhetoric they’re using about the need to secure an election against people trying to steal it, when the president has supporters who are prepared to carry weapons and to appoint themselves into militia-like roles, there’s a significant concern that there will be violence or physical disorder at the polls on election night and afterward during the canvass.

Here we get purely into the realm of speculation, but I think with a president like Trump who has shown a complete disregard for boundaries of law and norms, we have to worry also about what he might do that no one’s done before. He’s the incumbent president. He’s the chief law enforcement officer of the country under the Constitution. He’s the commander in chief of the armed services. What is he prepared to do in terms of deployment of U.S. forces? Is he prepared to order postal inspectors to seize and impound mail-in ballots on grounds that they have been forged or that there’s been an investigation into foreign fraud and therefore all those ballots must be seized and frozen in place and not counted? Is he prepared to send in U.S. marshals or Justice or [Department of Homeland Security] officials from other sub agencies to secure the peace, to secure the ballots, to preserve evidence, ostensibly. There are a lot of ways this could go very badly. And I think that no president has done it before. There are laws that would seem to constrain him from doing that. But I have little doubt that Bill Barr, the attorney general, is capable of finding executive authority for the president to do whatever he likes on Election Day. The question to me is, really, whether he thinks he can get away with it.

On what we can do to prepare for Election Day

I think because the mail-in ballots are going to be so much the subject of litigation, I’ve changed my own mind personally on how I’m going to vote. I’m going to vote in person because I think the worst case is that the president is ahead on election night and that a fuller count of the vote over coming days and weeks shows that Biden wins. That’s a very bad case because you have the possibility of weeks of serious disturbance in between.

I think anyone who can volunteer to be a poll worker should do so. I think if you know anyone who is open to reason, you should make sure they know that it’s normal and natural and lawful and proper for the count to continue to change after election night and that it’s sure to do so this time.

And then think about where you stand in relation to the election. If you were a mayor, you might want to think about how you deploy your police on Election Day to prevent the intervention of outsiders with bad intent. If you are a law enforcement officer, think about how the primacy of your mission to protect the vote, the most fundamental right we have in this country. If you’re a member of the military chain of command, you should pause to remember that you have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders and think about ways in which you might be misused during the course of an election.

If you’re a civil servant, we need you more than ever, I think, to say “no” to the wrong thing, to do the right thing, when you’re asked to do the wrong thing. You go down the list. There are a lot of people who have an influence over, broadly speaking, this moment of transition in this country between one presidential administration and another. And it may be a second term for Trump. I certainly don’t rule out that he could be reelected legitimately. But we have to make sure that the vote is counted, that all the votes are counted and that the election is decided by the voters and not by some other machinations.

Lauren Krenzel and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

COVID-19 is still spreading across the U.S., but you would barely know it by how people are planning to vote this year.

As the pandemic took hold in the spring, voting experts predicted a national shift toward mail or absentee voting: some experts predicted as many as 70% of all votes cast could be by mail, as was the case in Wisconsin’s April primary.

But over the past few months, fears about the Postal Service’s reliability, as well as President Trump’s constant railing against mail voting security, have meant fewer and fewer people planning to use the method to vote — to the point that officials now worry there may be such a crush of people who want to vote on Election Day it could lead to unsafe crowding and excessively long lines.

Both a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll and a Citizen Data poll found that just 35% of Americans now say they plan to vote by mail this fall. And half of all voters instead specifically plan to vote in person on Election Day, according to the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

“This is swinging the pendulum back too far,” said Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona election official and a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund who has been among the leading national advocates for expanding mail voting options this year. “It breaks my heart, but it does not surprise me.”

Jurisdictions across the country are having to consolidate polling precincts due to social distancing guidelines and a lack of available poll workers. In many cases officials have also been banking on a higher number of voters using the mail this year to “flatten the curve” of voters all trying to cast ballots at the same time in the same place.

If that doesn’t happen, Patrick said, there could be major problems.

“If we flood our in-person voting facilities in the middle of a global pandemic,” she said, “that is the recipe for some true chaos.”

Different reasons, same result

Early polls in the spring showed broad bipartisan support for voting by mail with almost 3 out of 4 Americans favoring universal access to absentee ballots, according to an April Pew Research poll.

But then the assault from President Trump and his administration began.

Trump seemed to allude to higher turnout elections favoring Democrats. He and Attorney General William Barr began regularly bringing up conspiracy theories about mail ballot fraud.

“Mail-In Ballots will lead to massive electoral fraud and a rigged 2020 Election,” Trump tweeted in July.

Republican voters got the message. By mid-August, just 11% of Trump supporters said they planned to use the mail to vote and it looked like Democrats would anchor the mail-voting expansion.

But then the spotlight turned to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and reports of massive postal delays. A series of high-profile congressional hearings and accusations by congressional Democrats about those delays led to fears that election mail would be a casualty.

In introducing a bill that would block the U.S. Postal Service from making operational changes, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Trump was instituting a “campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters.”

During the Democrats’ convention in August, former first lady Michelle Obama told voters, “We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.”

Those sorts of accusations seem to have had an effect on Democratic voters.

Half of Democrats nationally still say they plan to vote by mail, according to the NPR/Newshour/Marist poll, but that is down from the more than 60% of Democrats who said they were likely to vote by mail in an NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll earlier in the summer.

Specifically, the poll from this month also found that nonwhite voters were much more likely than white voters, 57% to 41%, to have doubts that the USPS will deliver election mail to voters and officials on time this year.

Doubts about the Postal Service are reasonable, considering the widely reported delays, says Gretchen Macht, an engineering professor who leads the URI Votes group at the University of Rhode Island, but they also could mean crowding on Election Day.

“For the average voter, [voting in person] is tried and true: ‘I know that my vote will count. I know when I get there, I will just wait in line and I will just do it,'” Macht said. “But for somebody who studies voting, you’re like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no! The system can’t handle all of you showing up!'”

Modeling differences

Predicting election turnout, and specifically voter behavior, is notoriously difficult.

It’s still possible that the number of voters who end up using the mail to cast a ballot is higher than the recent polls indicate. Projections by the nonpartisan data firm Citizen Data even indicate that scenario is likely.

The firm says its projections take into account the recent polling data, but also real voting behavior, like ballot requests and vote history, according to Citizen’s CEO, Mindy Finn.

The company’s projections show 50% of likely Florida voters voting by mail this year for instance, compared with 38% of likely Florida voters who responded in the company’s poll saying they intended to vote by mail.

The disparity may be explained by voters not taking into account the relative ease of voting by mail, the company says. Voters who respond in polling that they don’t plan to vote by mail may change their mind if they receive a ballot or ballot request form in the mail.

The firm also notes that their projections show a smaller partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats on whether they expect to vote by mail.

“We’re seeing high levels of intent to vote by mail from survey respondents nationwide, but in key states, our modeled projections are even higher,” said Rebecca Coffman, Citizen’s chief operating officer. “Of course, the landscape is incredibly dynamic. Some voters who say they don’t plan to vote by mail may not have received a mail ballot yet, for example.”

The company’s data shows similar differences between their projections and the poll responses in other battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Michigan.

All this has local election administrators doing their best to guess how their voters will vote this year.

Brianna Lennon, the county clerk of Boone County, Mo., said she started to sense a shift from voters away from the mail during Missouri’s August primary.

“What we started to see in August was people who requested an absentee ballot, had it mailed to them, and then said ‘ah I want to go to the polling place,'” Lennon said.

When she does public events, she says the most popular question she gets is whether the mail is a safe way to vote and whether a vote will be counted if it’s cast using the mail. It doesn’t help, Lennon said, that voters are being barraged with news about the dozens of pending lawsuits nationwide related to mail voting rules.

“They’re seeing Post Office stuff and they’re getting nervous; they’re seeing litigation and they’re getting nervous,” Lennon said. “And they want to switch.”

Patrick of the Democracy Fund said she wishes those nervous voters would react by sending their ballot in earlier, giving the Postal Service time to work, and not by abandoning the mail altogether.

Lennon is still expecting a big bump in the number of ballots in Boone County that come back through the mail, compared with 2016, when only about 7% of voters voted that way. But she’s not sure it’ll now be big enough to mean there won’t be long lines at some of the precincts in her jurisdiction.

“I would like November to be something like 30% [by mail], because I think that that will help alleviate congestion at the polling places,” Lennon said. “But I don’t know right now whether we’re going to get there or not.”