Regarding Election Day, Kevin Klein, head of Colorado’s Division of Homeland Security, said, “We prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

While officials advise voters not to wait until the last minute to vote, Klein said he anticipates more activity at the voter centers and drop boxes, and they’ll be watching and keeping a close on cybersecurity.

For Election Day, Klein anticipates that once the polls close at 7 p.m., they will shift to ensuring that information about the counts is accurate, that trusted sources of information are available, and combatting disinformation.

The agency focuses on what the public sees, including published vote counts on county election websites and the Secretary of State’s election count website, and guards against hacker attacks and other problems. That comes with assistance from network defense personnel from the Colorado National Guard and the Secretary of State’s office, he explained.

Klein said they will listen to what candidates or their proxies may say on election night, mainly misinformation. While they can’t stop candidates from spreading misinformation, he said, they do share that information with local election officials so that their communities know “the real story.”

Like many experts, Klein doesn’t believe the election will be over on Nov. 5. Ten years ago, perhaps, the “stand down” point was once the big television networks declared the winner on election night, he said.

This election? Not so much.

“We don’t anticipate that we’ll know the winner on election night,” Klein said.

That’s echoed by Common Caucus Colorado’s Aly Belknap and other western state Common Cause staff.

“We are determined to make sure Election Day is not results day,” said Ariana Marmolejo of Common Cause.

In Arizona, 80% vote by mail, but their bigger job is to inform voters about their rights, given legislation passed in that state in the last several years, according to Jenny Guzman of Common Cause Arizona.

As a battleground state that’s getting a lot of attention, poll workers are trained to ensure any issues on election day are handled and that voters get what they need.

Colorado’s Common Cause is part of the “Just Vote Colorado” election security coalition, which works directly with county clerks and election officials.

Just Vote Colorado gets tips on election interference from 866-our-vote (866-687-8683), which is already getting more calls this election cycle than in previous years.

Common Cause’s effort in Colorado includes 250 poll monitors deployed statewide, who observe drop boxes and voting service centers. Among their most important tasks is to monitor for intimidation, accessibility issues, election administration issues, and challenges to voter eligibility.

Belknap noted several new laws passed before the 2024 election, including a ban on concealed carry weapons in polling places, which expanded on the prohibition of open carry passed in 2018.

“It’s extremely important that we have folks out there to ensure and monitor that these laws are being followed and that there isn’t intimidation happening,” Belknap said. “If there is, we can respond to that.

Belknap also addressed the general attitude around the election. It’s been stressful, and in some places, “fear is really the point” in some communities. Monitors are trained to be a friendly, welcoming presence to serve as a “cultural antidote to the climate of fear purposely constructed” to keep people from participating.

Common Cause Colorado has 100 phone bankers who will start calling voters whose ballots are rejected due to signature discrepancies, which she said primarily impacts young and first-time voters and counties with higher-than-normal rejection rates. She specifically identified Adams and El Paso counties, although later said Adams County will be a bigger focus next week.

Some Common Cause volunteers are voting in person on Election Day and are to report back on their experience, whether that’s accessibility issues or the vibe at the polls in general.

They will also have trained, nonpartisan attorneys on hand if needed.

Voting on college campuses is also part of the Common Cause effort. Belknap said Colorado has some of the highest youth turnout in the nation, which means 40 student poll monitors on seven college campuses.

Protecting ballots after they are turned in has become a focus in the 2024 election season. In Oregon last week, a fire damaged three ballots when it was set at a ballot box.

Kate Titus of Common Cause Oregon said there is a 50-state story to sew distrust in the election. “In this emerging landscape, I think our presence as democracy watchdogs may be more important than ever in states like Oregon,” she said.

Suzanne Almeida, Common Cause’s state operations director, said the environment around the election is tense.

“While we may see isolated incidents of political violence, threats, and harassment, and all are deeply concerning, the overall system is secure, and there is no reason to believe we will not have a successful election.”

Rachel Brown, an expert on political violence with the National Task Force on Election Crises, said it only takes a minor amount of violence, one instance of violence, or a significant threat or intimidation to make it seem like violence is everywhere and a significant threat. And that’s an effort to quash voter participation, she said.

But many measures and many people are working hard to ensure that it is safe to vote, Brown said. She expects to see efforts at voter intimidation from narratives and rhetoric targeting specific voters or from individuals motivated often by that rhetoric and who show up to take action.

Brown added that in the post-election landscape, she would expect people to try to target the process, but she believes that’s countered by officials who refuse to be intimidated and a high level of preparedness, from the national to the local level. She also pointed to lower membership numbers in groups that tried to interfere with the 2020 election.

Brown noted that most election violence tends to happen before and after Election Day, although “I wouldn’t expect us to see a high level of organized violence, and people should feel safe voting. If there is any danger, it’s likely to be very highly localized, such as a single person taking action.”

Election Day itself is not the most high-risk moment, and it’s the easiest to prepare for, she explained.

Ezra Rosenberg is director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a member of the election crises task force. He spoke about the three kinds of lawsuits that are most common during the election cycle: voter purges, lawsuits around curing absentee ballots, and changes to the certification process. NBC News reported last month that more than 100 lawsuits have been filed in the battleground states, the majority filed by Republicans.

Jiamin Huang, a data scientist at VoteShield, said that the margin in each state is important to examine on election night and in the days after to determine vote counts.

“If the race is really, really close, which current polling suggests that it will be, then you just need more ballots to be counted in order to project a winner,” Huang said. “In some cases, you need every ballot to be counted and possibly recounted, which is why it can take days or even weeks to call a very close race…It’s very likely that some states will be super close and will take longer to be called, and other states will be less, less close and can be called more quickly.”

She pointed out that in Georgia in 2020, a recount took 16 days to complete before the race could be called.

A second factor is mail-in ballots and how fast they’re counted, but data from 2022 compared to the COVID election year of 2020 shows fewer people are using the mail ballot option in the battleground states, and she believes that will be true this year as well.

Huang said the last factor is the legal one, and that includes challenges to military and overseas ballots, provisional ballots, ballots that might be cured, and late-arriving ballots that could add up to tens of thousands of votes.

“There is a world where the outcome of the election hinges on whether some of these ballots can be counted or not,” Huang said. “In that world, we would not know the outcome until those legal questions are decided on,” which could take quite a while. “If polls are correct on how close the race is, we might be waiting longer than we were in 2020,” she said.