WASHINGTON – Pulling off a successful election amid partisan rancour, rampant misinformation and widespread doubts about the electoral system itself has been hard. What comes next could be harder.

This is the first election in which a substantial number of candidates for major offices are election deniers or conspiracy theorists. Whether and how such defeated candidates and their supporters will accept their losses is a major unknown.

This is also the first election in which an army of private poll watchers – largely recruited by groups wedded to the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen – is expected to try to gather evidence of fraud for later use in court battles and as fuel for protests.

This could be an election in which the outcomes of many close races would probably remain unknown for an extended time, should an expected cascade of lawsuits, recounts and other obstacles snarl the counting process. Whether delays will fuel the already poisonous mix of rumours and outright lies about the vote remains to be seen.

And this is the first election after the attack on the US Capitol brought the gravity of the nation’s political and cultural divides into sharp relief – and for many voters ratcheted upward the stakes of Tuesday’s vote and the ones to follow.

Battle over ballots

Mr Nate Persily, an expert on election procedures and law at Stanford University, said the election’s aftermath would depend on how close the races were and what signals were sent out by powerful voices like former president Donald Trump, Fox News and defeated candidates.

“If Republicans do extremely well on Tuesday, I think there’s going to be less aggressive fighting in the post-election period,” he said. “If it’s close – and especially if the Senate is hanging in the balance – we could see a serious conflict.”

Despite glaring obstacles, the thousands of officials who oversaw the actual vote were largely confident that it would go well, in no small part because their preparations were as much a disaster-response exercise as a civics one. They have far fewer assurances about the tallying process that is now underway.

Already, legal conflicts over the counting of absentee ballots seem certain to erupt in states with close races, especially Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Courts in Wisconsin have failed to settle disputes over whether applications for mail ballots must be thrown out if voters’ addresses are incomplete but still decipherable – for example, if an address omits a town name but includes a ZIP code.

In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court has ordered local election officials to sequester ballots with missing or erroneous dates and not to count them in Tuesday’s vote. But the court deadlocked on whether federal voting law required such ballots to be counted, and Democrats and voting-rights advocates already have filed a federal suit over that question.

‘It’s all about the outcome’

The new presence of partisan poll watchers adds an extra possibility for delays to such legal fights and other challenges to results, said Mr Barry Burden, who directs the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Their mission, as outlined by some who recruited them, is to document the evidence of fraud that was totally absent from court challenges to the 2020 elections.

“They go in as sceptics, and they’re not professionally trained, so they’re looking for things that validate beliefs they already have,” Mr Burden said. “I expect election observers are going to be watching ballot processing very closely, and if there are lawsuits, I would expect them to be at the centre of them”, as well as in other challenges like recounts and audits.

Delays and countercharges in ballot fights open space for rumours, hyper-political spin and outright disinformation to breed and spread, said Mr David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Arizona may be a state to watch, not only because it hosts a healthy roster of candidates who make the baseless claim that election fraud is rampant but also because the legislature has lowered the threshold for ordering mandatory recounts of close elections. Tight races there are more likely to experience recounts, delays and the fraud charges that accompany them than ever before.

“It’s all about the outcome and creating this opening for delegitimizing the process when you lose,” Mr Becker said. “The problem with this is it also incites anger and potentially violence.” NYTIMES