In the spring of last year, Shasta County, California, handed its elections office to a man who had never run one. The Board of Supervisors appointed Clint Curtis registrar, and within days he fired his assistant registrar, Joanna Francescut, a seventeen-year veteran of the office. This June, Shasta’s voters got their say. They gave the job to Francescut, about 58 to 42.
Curtis certified that primary on July 2. Then he said some of the ballots didn’t look, feel or smell right, and padlocked the room they were in. In September Curtis said a federal grand jury had subpoenaed the ballots, and the FBI put its own seal on the door. Curtis runs Shasta’s November election anyway. Francescut takes office in January.
That one county holds most of what people are afraid of four weeks out, and most of what should steady them. A lot of you are asking whether the system will hold on November 3. I don’t think anyone can answer that by predicting. But this country has been running elections all year — off-year races, primaries, recounts, canvasses, court fights — and the record of how they went is a better guide than anyone’s forecast, mine included. So here is the ledger: where it held, where it bent, and who it has already failed. Every line links to someone who isn’t me.
The pattern first, because it organizes everything else. Nearly every attempt to bend an election this year has needed someone to say yes — a judge, a canvass board, a county clerk, a legislature. Mostly they said no. What got through was the pressure that needed nobody’s permission.
So the plain answer, before the evidence: the count is holding. The defenses around it are not what they were. And for some voters, the system has already failed — not in a hypothetical November, but this year, on the record.
The courts. The Justice Department sued 30 states and D.C. for their full, unredacted voter files — including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. It has not won one. Twenty-six have been dismissed, including an appeals-court loss in June, and it sued states with Republican election chiefs too. The president’s March order restricting mail voting, and the Postal Service rule built on it, were blocked for this election by two federal judges — one of them a Trump appointee who found key parts of the rule likely beyond its authority. On September 14 the Supreme Court refused to revive it, saying the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits.” In June it upheld the grace periods that let states count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day. Your mail ballot works the way it did last time.
When the Justice Department subpoenaed the names, home addresses and phone numbers of Fulton County’s 2020 election workers, another Trump-appointed judge quashed it, calling the demand “staggering” and finding no legitimate law enforcement purpose. Some of the judges stopping these efforts were appointed by the president making them.
Certification. Since 2020, more than 30 county officials in eight states have refused or delayed certifying an election. Every time, the results were certified in the end. I looked for a county that refused to certify a 2026 primary and found none. In Shasta, Curtis tried to stall the board’s final declaration, but he had already certified. Washoe County, Nevada, where one commissioner has voted no on election after election since 2020, certified 4–1.
Recounts. In an Indiana state Senate primary, a recount commission threw out six ballots because the county clerk’s office had failed to stamp or sign them, and the result flipped. The Indiana Supreme Court reversed it on September 10 and seated the original winner, by three votes. A voter doesn’t lose a ballot because an official forgot a stamp.
Checks that cut against both parties. This is the part I’d most want an anxious person to sit with. Missouri’s Republican legislature redrew its congressional map at the president’s urging; citizens forced a referendum, and the Supreme Court refused three times to let the new map be used. Virginia voters narrowly approved a Democratic redraw, and Virginia’s Supreme Court voided it because the legislature had skipped a step the state constitution requires. Most of Indiana’s Republican state senators voted down the president’s map, and several of them lost their primaries for it. A guardrail that stops only one party is a weapon. These stopped both.
The voters. Where voters got a direct say over who runs their elections, they chose competence. Shasta is one. In Mesa County, Colorado, where Tina Peters was clerk, voters kept her successor — a longtime veteran of the office who now posts anonymized ballot images for anyone to check — over a Peters supporter, about 70 to 30. Last November, the losing candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey conceded within a day.
The people. The thing that held most is the thing least covered. Half the counties in eleven Western states have a new chief election official since 2020, according to Issue One, and most of them left voluntarily. That sounds like a hollowed-out system. Look closer and it mostly isn’t: a twenty-year study found that new chief officials bring an average of about eight years of prior election experience. Most of the new people in charge learned the work before they got the job. The typical local election official in America is a woman in her fifties earning about $50,000.
And when skeptics run the checks themselves, the checks tend to win. Wyoming now requires a hand-count audit of a share of ballots; the primary audits largely matched the machines. South Dakota’s secretary of state was elected with the backing of hand-count activists, built hand-count audits, watched them confirm the tabulators, and said so in public at real political cost.
Everything in this section had one thing in common: it needed no judge’s permission.
The data. At least sixteen states handed over their full voter files to the Justice Department voluntarily, and the department has said in court that it intends to share voter data with the Department of Homeland Security for citizenship checks. A court can dismiss a lawsuit. It can’t stop a state that says yes.
The citizenship database. DHS rebuilt a benefits tool called SAVE to check voter rolls in bulk. It is wrong often enough to matter: in Texas, 578 of the 2,724 voters it flagged — more than one in five — turned out to be citizens. On September 25 the Supreme Court allowed it back. Federal law bars systematic purges in the last 90 days before a federal election, which protects November 3 from a mass removal. Individual challenges are still allowed.
The seized ballots. In January the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of Fulton County’s 2020 ballots and records, on an affidavit NPR found relied on claims that had already been debunked. A judge let the government keep them. As of September 30, no one has been charged.
The warning letters. In July the Justice Department wrote to every state that election officials who “knowingly” keep noncitizens on the rolls face criminal liability. Forty-five percent of local election officials now say they are concerned about a politically motivated investigation, according to the Brennan Center’s survey.
The defenses that were taken apart. The federal cybersecurity agency that helped local election offices was cut deeply, and election officials say its renewed help came too late to plan around. The FBI’s foreign influence task force was disbanded last year. The Federal Election Commission has had no quorum since April 2025 and cannot enforce campaign law. When a Russian network started pushing fake videos targeting Democrats, including Senate candidates, in September, it was independent researchers who caught it. Nothing I found suggests the counting machinery itself has been breached. The people who used to watch it are thinner on the ground.
The words. The president has said Republicans “ought to nationalize the voting” and last fall posted “No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting.” Words don’t move a ballot. They do move trust. Confidence that the midterms will be run fairly and accurately is now 55 percent, and the gap between the parties has nearly closed, mostly because Democrats lost faith: from 77 percent in 2024 to 58, while Republicans rose from 47 to 55.
The Supreme Court’s own pattern. It has been consistent about one thing: it blocks chaos that arrives late, whichever side causes it, and it lets structural change through when it arrives early. That pattern protected November’s mail ballots. It also produced the next section.
Everything above measures whether the count will hold. For some people that is the wrong measure, because for them it already didn’t.
Black voters in the Deep South. On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais and hollowed out the part of the Voting Rights Act that protected majority-Black districts. Within weeks, Tennessee split its Memphis district, Alabama got its old map back, and Louisiana dismantled a Black-majority district — suspending House primaries that were already underway to do it. Courts allowed all of it. Every vote in those districts will be counted accurately. They were drawn so it matters less. I wrote about this the day it happened, and it belongs at the center of any honest answer about whether the system is holding.
Mail voters whose ballots arrive late. Since December, a postmark may no longer show the day you mailed your ballot. A Brookings study of three states’ primaries found that mail ballots rejected for arriving late roughly doubled after the postal redesign, and projects tens of thousands of extra late rejections nationally in November. That is one study, and I’d rather flag it than drop it. The fix is in your hands: mail early.
Citizens a database gets wrong. People naturalized recently are the most likely to be flagged by SAVE, because their Social Security records often haven’t caught up — the point Justice Jackson made in dissent. In Maricopa County, the recorder flagged 207 voters as noncitizens; the county attorney reviewed 60 and confirmed eight.
Texans in a backlog. A software error in the Department of Public Safety’s web portal has left hundreds of thousands of registration records in limbo, nearly 70,000 in Dallas County alone. State officials knew about problems with the portal as early as March.
The people who run it. A third of local election officials have been threatened, harassed or abused, according to that same Brennan survey. In Missouri in 2024, a county clerk ran the hand count her residents asked for, concluded the machines were more accurate, said so — and resigned citing threats and harassment.
A system can count every ballot it receives and still fail the people whose ballots arrive a day late, whose districts were dissolved, and whose names a database got wrong. Nobody gets left behind is the plank this campaign is built on. Measured that way, the system did not hold for these people.
The hardest test comes after November 3, not on it. Before an election, courts can stop a rule before it takes effect. After an election, the pressure points are the county canvass, state certification, and, for the House, the clerk’s roll of members-elect on January 3 — a duty Lawfare argues is ministerial and likely enforceable in court.
The pieces for a fight are already on the table: seized ballots with no charges, a grand jury subpoena Curtis says he received for a county’s 2026 ballots, and about 1,000 Justice Department election monitors, up from 714 in 2024. The homeland security secretary has said ICE would appear at polling places only for a threat or a warrant, and a lawsuit challenging even that is pending. Federal law bars troops or armed men at the polls, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has said there are no plans to send any.
What I don’t know: whether courts and states can move as fast after an election as they did before it. Nobody has tested a certification deadline against an active federal investigation. Anyone who tells you how that goes is guessing. County officials are not waiting to find out — some are training on how to respond to a federal search warrant.
The system people are worried about isn’t a machine. It is thousands of local offices, most of them run by someone who learned the work before they got the job. This year, when bending an election needed someone’s yes, most of the people asked said no. The next time it counts is after November 3.