The First Votes Will Soon Be Cast

When Krissi Miles, the manager of absentee voting in Tuscaloosa County, Ala., began electronically issuing ballots to military service members yesterday, she was taking a routine step that’s part of a milestone for this election.

The first ballots have gone out.

“In just a few minutes, I will start issuing ballots for all the other applicants,” Miles told me over the phone today, very kindly and politely suggesting that I let her return to her work mailing out absentee ballots. “I have anywhere between 1,000 and 1,500, much more than I anticipated.”

As my little ticker above says, there are officially 54 days left in the fall campaign (count ’em!). But the fact that absentee ballots are going in the mail in Alabama, and that other states will soon follow suit with various forms of absentee, mail or early in-person voting, means that for a growing number of Americans, Election Day is practically here.

It’s a big deal for the campaigns, one that heralds a shift from simply persuading voters to turning them out. In a narrow election that is best described as a “game of inches,” the pool of voters who can still change their minds is about to start shrinking, because their ballots will be cast.

It’s also a new season of stress on the election system itself, one that is already being tested by lawsuits that have created complications and uncertainties for the workers who oversee it. At the same time, Donald Trump is stoking doubts about mail voting while his allies are trying to get his supporters to use that method of voting.

Michella Huff, the director of elections in Surry County, N.C., had some 544 absentee ballots just about ready to go out by mail on Friday — when that process was supposed to begin in North Carolina — but then