The election judges nod solemnly and scribble notes. Most are over 60, and they've been through similar trainings before. They've run the polls during tough elections before, too. But they are nervous. Finally, interrupting the trainer's staccato marching orders, a woman raises her hand and asks what's on everyone's mind: "Can they change the law on us again after we start?"

"Don't even ask that question!" Buxkemper says, only half-joking. "I would just say be ready for anything."

This fall, "be ready for anything" has become the credo of local election offices in Texas and several states like it, where legal challenges to new voting laws have resulted in a steady stream of court rulings that have confused voters and forced elections administrators to invent new procedures on the fly. In recent weeks, as the election judges know, Texas's voter-ID law was ruled discriminatory and unconstitutional by a federal District judge—and then abruptly reinstated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. With fewer than 72 hours before polls open, the Supreme Court still hasn't made a final call. The steps the election judges are being instructed to follow still could change by the time voters show up.

For those who run elections, this kind of uncertainty is nightmarish. The final stretch before an election is the culmination of a constant, ongoing effort that began soon after the votes were counted in the previous election; last-minute changes can play havoc with the careful planning that, in any municipality of notable size, has been months in the making. "Because most people only see elections on Election Day, I don't think they realize how much lead time there is—how much of the iceberg is below the surface," says Doug Chapin, who directs the University of Minnesota's Election Academy. "Election Day is like Black Friday and the day after Christmas, rolled into one and multiplied by 1,000," says David Becker, director of election initiatives at Pew Charitable Trusts. "Everyone expects [election officials] to get their job right 100 percent of the time, and the untold story is that the vast majority of the time, they do."

But in states where the election laws keep changing—something that, before this year, had rarely happened after Labor Day—getting it right has never been a more complicated affair. In the six weeks leading up to Nov. 4, I spoke regularly with officials who run local elections in North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin, where court rulings continued to contradict one another well into October. Would the unsung heroes of American elections be able to keep the process running smoothly despite the obstacles? And how would new voting restrictions—if they ultimately took effect—affect elections where they happen, on the ground?

Travis County clerk Dana DeBeauvoir meticulously plans elections in advance—but this year, she couldn't be sure what to plan for. (Steven Noreyko)

These local officials are on the front lines of "the voting wars," a term coined by University of California (Irvine) law professor Rick Hasen in his 2012 book of the same name. It's a recent conflict. For more than three decades after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, the arc of American elections bent steadily, state by state, toward ever-greater convenience and inclusiveness. Innovations such as early voting and same-day registration knocked down some of the obstacles faced by low-income and working-class voters. By and large, the steady liberalizing of voting laws was met with no partisan opposition, no controversy.

Then came the ugly postscript to the 2000 presidential election, written both in Florida and in the courts. The Bush v. Gore debacle spawned a new era of election litigation. Democrats pushed to expand early voting and same-day registration, which attract more Democratic-leaning voters than Republicans, while Republicans argued for limiting early-voting days and requiring voters to show one of only a few types of photo ID, which Democratic-leaning voters are more likely to lack than Republicans. When the GOP captured a record number of state legislative majorities in 2010, they took action. Since 2011, 22 states have passed new voting restrictions. Some of them, like Wisconsin's voter-ID law, were blocked by court orders after being challenged. Others, such as Texas's strict voter-ID requirements, were stymied by the Justice Department under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with histories of racial discrimination in elections to get "preclearance" to change election laws.

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 and removed a major barrier to enacting restrictions in states such as North Carolina, which was also covered under the section, and Texas. Within hours of the ruling, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced that the state would henceforth enforce its law—which led to a Justice Department lawsuit and the many subsequent court battles. One month later, North Carolina lawmakers green-lighted what many voting-rights experts consider the most wide-ranging set of voting restrictions in modern history. North Carolina's voter-ID requirement won't be enforced until the 2016 presidential election, but in the meantime, the state cut early-voting days from 17 to 10, ended same-day registration, and outlawed paid voter-registration drives—including one that had been run by the state itself.

As the legal battles sparked by these laws dragged into the fall, elections officials in places such as Austin, Milwaukee, and Durham found themselves scrambling, making contingency plans, and waiting for the next decision to come down. It was, to borrow from Project Runway, the ultimate "make-it-work" moment. "In our world, there's no mistakes allowed," says Dana DeBeauvoir, the county clerk who has run Travis County's elections since 1987. "I don't know of any other world where perfection is the name of the game."

 

T-MINUS SIX WEEKS UNTIL ELECTION DAY

On Sept. 22, the three-week federal court battle over Texas's voter-ID law wraps up. Nobody knows when Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos will issue her decision, and nobody is more eager for it to arrive than Dana DeBeauvoir. Her Travis County clerk's office has already mounted a PR campaign to alert constituents to the new ID law; it has placed giant ads on the sides of city buses and launched a website called Keep Calm, Vote On, which details the new rules in four languages. If the judge strikes down the law, DeBeauvoir will have a new challenge on her hands: Explain to everyone that the voter-ID law the Travis County clerk's office has been telling them about isn't going to take effect after all.

While she waits, there's nothing to do but press on. DeBeauvoir's office has just completed one of its wonkiest, and most time-consuming, exercises, called "logic and accuracy testing." The process is designed to make certain that all the different ballots in the county—with all the different combinations of local contests—are accurate. It took 55 people working six 10- and 12-hour days, DeBeauvoir says, to check and cross-check 36,000 test ballots. "If we don't do it, we can't sleep at night being absolutely certain the ballot is correct," she says.

Like most election nerds, DeBeauvoir lives for precision and predictability. But she is unusual in the staid world of elections administrators for also being opinionated and gregarious; she has a juiced-up, caffeinated edge, even as she explains the logic and accuracy tests. DeBeauvoir remembers her horror after she was elected county clerk in 1987 (some elections chiefs are elected, while others are appointed) and got her first peek inside the punch-card voting machines the county then used. What, she asked, were those dots of paper piled at the bottom of the machine? Those are the votes, she was told. It wasn't long before DeBeauvoir had introduced state-of-the-art voting machines to Travis County, complete with backup records.

DeBeauvoir has long been a national leader in using new technologies to clean up election systems and make voting more convenient. She does time-motion testing to gauge in advance how long it will take voters to complete their ballots (this year, with an unusually long, 16-page ballot, she has it timed to 10 to 12 minutes), so her office can determine how many machines and clerks it will need at each polling place. DeBeauvoir was also among the first elections officials to make it possible for voters to cast ballots at any polling place in her county, rather than only at their local precinct.

But even for a cutting-edge elections chief like DeBeauvoir, there is no way to measure or predict what will happen if the voter-ID law goes into effect. How many voters will simply stay away? How many problems—and lines—will be created at the polls when people try to vote without the newly required ID? This is teeth-grinding stuff for DeBeauvoir, but she professes confidence that they'll figure it out, one way or another. "We just have to be very quick on our feet," she says.

Thirteen hundred miles away, in Durham, North Carolina, county Director of Elections Michael Perry has even more variables than DeBeauvoir to consider. The state's sweeping 2013 voting law, much of which is currently being challenged in federal court, attracted the most attention for its strict voter-ID provision, which won't go into effect this year. But the law contained a multitude of lesser-known changes that are in effect—at least for now. People marched and protested about the voter-ID portion of the law, Perry says, "but when the actual deal came down, [the new law] had 60 parts to it that touched every part of the voting process."

It's still unclear at this late date whether all those changes will be in effect when voting starts. It's not even clear when voting will start—possibly on Oct 16, maybe on Oct. 23, depending on where the courts eventually settle. But Perry talks about it all with the calm of a Southern-accented Zen master. Until he became an elections administrator nine years ago, the 55-year-old had worked in computer technology for manufacturing firms. It was good training, he says. "What I learned in manufacturing was processes," he says. "When you look at voting, it's the same concepts—this goal, this objective, and all of these different steps and processes that have to occur for you to meet those goals." But the stakes, he says, are very different. Before, his work "didn't really mean a whole lot." Now, Perry says, he's applying his love for smart processes to "something important and significant at the end of the day."

Election worker Karen Witham checks voter identifications at Richter Church on Tuesday in Centropolis Township, near Ottawa, Kansas. (Julie Denesha/Getty Images)Perry is optimistic that confusion over the new laws won't keep many away from the polls; he's already seeing evidence that registration drives by voting-rights groups, fueled by the passage of voting restrictions, are getting results. "We're processing more voter-registration applications than we've ever seen," he says. And even if early-voting days are fewer, he notes, the new law requires the same total number of early-voting hours; Durham has added new locations and longer hours to the remaining days. That's crucial, he says, because so many Durhamites cast their ballots early—70 percent of voters in recent cycles.

The change that concerns Perry the most sounds rather obscure. In the past, when North Carolina voters showed up at the wrong polling place, they could cast provisional ballots that would usually still be partially counted. Not everybody did it mistakenly: People who worked on one side of town knew they could vote there rather than in their home precinct, and university students who lived off-campus could vote on-campus if it was more convenient. Now, if voters cast a provisional ballot at the wrong precinct on Election Day, their votes won't count.

That, of course, all assumes the new rules will actually apply when voting starts. Perry isn't relying on that. While the new law disallows same-day registration, for instance, "there is a potential they could come back and say, 'No, you will be doing same-day registration,' " he says. Switching back to the old status quo wouldn't be so hard, Perry says. But while he says he's ready for whatever comes his way, Perry wryly notes that, "at some point, it's going to be impossible to add seven days [back] to the early-voting period." There won't be enough time left.

 

T-MINUS FIVE WEEKS 

Neil Albrecht, the plainspoken 52-year-old who runs elections in Milwaukee, is too busy to be calm or wry. Just two weeks ago, on Sept. 12, the most controversial court ruling of the election season turned Wisconsin's voting process into a ball of confusion by unexpectedly requiring the state's voter-ID law, suspended by the courts since 2011, to go into effect by the time early voting begins on Oct. 20.

When the ruling came down, Albrecht's permanent staff of seven and temporary staff of around 30 was already working to nail down the logistics of opening the city's 193 precincts, and was scurrying to recruit enough poll workers. Suddenly, a wrench was thrown into the works. Thousands of voters who'd applied for absentee ballots had to be informed that, under the new law, they could no longer get a ballot—absentee or otherwise— without showing a state-issued photo ID at a county office. A public-information campaign had to be launched, from scratch, to let voters know what kind of identification they'd now need.

As we talk on Oct. 2, Albrecht and his employees are in the midst of calling and emailing more than 2,000 poll workers they trained over the summer, to give them unwelcome news: They'll have to come back for an additional class on voter ID. Albrecht doesn't hide his frustration. "These are not full-time employees, these are not city clerks," he says. "These are retirees trying to role-model a spirit of civic responsibility, and [it] has become increasingly challenging for them to feel confident in their competence."

"The point is," DeBeauvoir says, "we want to send the message to voters: Calm down, it's going to be OK."

Although he's concerned about what will happen to those who requested absentee ballots, Albrecht says his biggest worry is about college students; university IDs alone will no longer work at the polls. "If I were to rank their collective knowledge level from 1 to 10 going into this election," Albrecht says of the students, "I'd probably put them at 2. Some of our highest-turnout wards are student wards. We're very concerned that we're going to lose that vote."

Albrecht's fundamental problem is one he can't solve: The courts left way too little time, he says, for Wisconsin officials to ensure that every voter knows what to bring to the polls—or how to attain acceptable ID if he or she lacks it. How much time would have been sufficient? "Six to eight months," Albrecht says. "I would think that any person, whether they support or oppose voter ID, could recognize that it is a very significant change to election law. It requires a very comprehensive public-education campaign." He's certain that some people will be convinced that voting this year won't be worth the hassle. "I can set aside my agreement or disagreement with the policy," he says, "but my concern ... is first of all the voter: How will voters be able to process this change? Will they be able to process this change? There's no question in my mind that this will be a deterrent," Albrecht says. The only question, he believes, is how many voters will be deterred.

The courts continue to throw curveballs at other states as well. On Oct. 1, a federal Appeals Court grants a preliminary injunction that blocks key provisions in North Carolina's new law; same-day registration will be back in place for early voting, and out-of-precinct voting will again be allowed, although early voting days will remain at 10.

Durham's Michael Perry sounds characteristically unruffled. "We're just going back to the way we used to do it," he says. He's counting his blessings that North Carolina, unlike Wisconsin, trains its poll workers very close to the start of early voting—"so we don't have to flip-flop on them," he says.

But there could still be more flip-flopping to come, as Perry knows: North Carolina's law is headed to the Supreme Court.

 

T-MINUS FOUR WEEKS 

Dana DeBeauvoir can barely contain her joy. A day earlier, on Oct. 9, District Judge Ramos had finally issued her ruling in the Texas voter-ID trial: The law amounted to a poll tax, the judge said, and was designed to intentionally discriminate against minorities. The judge subsequently orders an injunction against implementing the law. Voter ID looks like a goner in Texas, at least for this year.

The ruling has left DeBeauvoir with a challenge that is, in a way, the opposite of what Albrecht has been facing in Milwaukee. As soon as she gets official word from the secretary of state, she will have to use her public-relations skills to let voters know, in the 11 days left before early voting, that they don't have to worry about those pesky IDs after all—that they can still vote with a utility bill in Texas. It sounds daunting, but DeBeauvoir is not complaining. "If you had to make a last-minute change, this goes in the direction of making it easier for voters. This is happy confusion."

Milwaukee Elections chief Neil Albrecht had to deal with a September surprise from the courts—until the decision was overturned in October. (Ralf-Finn Hestoft)

Confusion is the theme of the week. The rules change again in North Carolina, when the Supreme Court reverses the previous week's lower-court order and restores the state's new voting restrictions. That means same-day registration is out again, and restrictions on provisional voting are back. But it also means that voters, not to mention a lot of poll workers, may be even more confused about the election laws than they were before. Michael Perry remains philosophical. "The people who are paying attention are going to be aware of the back-and-forth," he says, "and the ones that aren't don't know anyways." Maybe, he hopes, most people didn't even notice that the rules changed for four days before they changed back.

There's little chance of such blissful ignorance in Wisconsin, where September's court order to implement strict voter-ID rules was followed by vociferous debate. But now, that ruling, too, goes up in smoke: The day after it allows North Carolina's new law to go into effect, the Supreme Court strikes down Wisconsin's new voter-ID requirement. Neil Albrecht, relieved, immediately cancels all those extra training sessions for poll workers. He sends out the thousands of absentee ballots his office had been holding until the applicants came through with proper ID. And he sounds a whole lot better than he did last time we talked. Instead of scrambling to implement voter-ID requirements, he says, "We can really go back to encouraging voter participation in the election. It allows us the opportunity to focus on other aspects of the election that are really critical—that we would have been focusing on for the last five weeks, had the sudden decision around voter ID not occurred."

 

T-MINUS THREE WEEKS

The happy confusion in Texas is short-lived. On Oct. 14, five days after Texas's new voter-ID regime was apparently ruled out, the 5th Circuit Appeals Court rules it back in. Only six days remain until the start of early voting, and there's still a chance of yet another reversal: One last time this fall, the Supreme Court will have the final word on a state's election law.

As she guides her staff and poll workers—along with voters and reporters—through the mire of rulings, reversals, and court orders, DeBeauvoir is determined to channel her inner Michael Perry. She'll just roll with the punches from now on, she tells me, and try to keep everybody else from freaking out as well. "The point is," she says, "we want to send the message to voters: Calm down, it's going to be OK."

Three days later, at 5 a.m. on Saturday, the news breaks: The Supreme Court has decided by a 6-3 vote that Texas's voter-ID law must be put in place. With just over 48 hours until polls open in the state, local elections officials finally know what the rules will be. Once again, there's no reason given for the majority ruling. But this time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stays up all night to author a short, sharply worded dissent, cosigned by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. "The greatest threat to public confidence in elections," Ginsburg writes, comes from "enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters."

 

T-MINUS TWO WEEKS

When early voting begins in Travis County, DeBeauvoir is nowhere to be seen. Stuck in bed with strep throat and no voice, she's out for the first three days of balloting, pleading with her doctor to get her well as soon as possible. Her absence means that her staffers, most of whom would rather stare at a spreadsheet than appear on the evening news, have to handle media requests while making sure all 22 permanent early-voting locations—not to mention the city's dozens of mobile-voting units—are humming along. "It was terrible on my people," DeBeauvoir tells me when she can finally speak again.

Luckily, the mechanics of early voting are finely tuned in Austin. In keeping with DeBeauvoir's "customer-oriented" approach, many of the early-voting locations are in supermarkets, as well as in more-traditional locations such as libraries and schools. "People will get tripped, practically—they walk in a grocery store and [the polls are] right there in front of them," she says. "A grocery store is just about the most democratic—small 'd'—outreach you could get." Voters can vote anywhere in the county, and before they try a location, they can check a live feed on the county website to see if there's a waiting line.

For all the officials' high-tech tools, they have no way to measure the reasons why people stay away—or how much impact new voting laws, and the controversy swirling around them, may have had.

Neil Albrecht wishes he could offer that kind of service in Milwaukee, where early voting also kicked off on Oct. 20. But under state law, each municipality can open only one early-voting place. That's fine for a small town like Janesville, but it's a burden for the state's largest city. Milwaukee's lone early-voting location sits across the street from City Hall, open 11 hours a day. But parking can be a hassle, and lines can quickly accumulate, which, Albrecht says, "can be a deterrent in and of itself." The proof is in the numbers: While a majority of Travis County voters, and 70 percent of Durham voters, cast their ballots during early voting, typically only about 12 percent of Milwaukee voters do the same. Which puts a lot of pressure on Election Day.

 

T-MINUS ONE WEEK 

Even Michael Perry is getting frazzled by now. On the day before North Carolina's shortened early-voting period ends, I ask the Durham elections chief if he can talk for five minutes. Can I cut it to three? he asks. Even in the middle of that short conversation, he has to beg off to take a call from his deputy. We talk again on Nov. 1, just after early voting ends. Perry's optimism has been vindicated, it seems: Turnout, he says, was high from the first day, "typical of a presidential election" rather than a midterm. When he arrived to open the first location at 6:30 the first morning, Perry says, he found voters already waiting in line. "We were slammed from 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.," he says. "It might have been a little less stressful for everybody if we'd had a few more days," he adds. It was a bit stressful for voters, too; they had to wait as long as two hours in line at times. But they waited.

It's a different story in Travis County. For all of DeBeauvoir's systems, PR campaigns, and "customer-oriented" early-voting places, turnout is disheartening—no better than in the 2010 midterms, when turnout was 40 percent. It's impossible to say why, exactly; the state had no competitive marquee races this year, so maybe people weren't fired up enough to come out. The voter-ID law may have kept others away. There's no way to know.

The process has been mostly smooth, DeBeauvoir says, but she has run into some of the voter-ID complications she had feared. As she drives to a staff briefing, she tells me about one "particularly heartbreaking" story that she can't get out of her head. A 61-year-old woman, disabled and low-income, had arrived at a polling place expecting to vote, as she had in every election since 1972. But her expired driver's license, under the new law, was no longer adequate identification. The woman said she could not renew her license, however, because she was paying off parking tickets. The easiest alternative form of ID, a new Texas voter-ID card, is available only to those who don't have driver's licenses, so she would have to surrender her license to get one. The voter burst into tears at the polling place, and later called DeBeauvoir, crying. There was nothing the county clerk could do.

Recounting the story gets DeBeauvoir fired up—and speaking frankly. "This law is meant to discriminate against people," she says. "There is no voter impersonation. In 28 years, I've never seen it. What is this vague bogeyman we're supposed to be afraid of? All we've done is disenfranchise marginalized people."

 

ELECTION DAY

Just before lunchtime on a cloudy Election Day in Austin, I head to the Fiesta supermarket, right off the city's main highway, to cast my ballot. The voting booths are near the entrance, just across from the Fiesta's taqueria, and I take my place in line behind three other voters in an aisle with organic health foods on one side and a display of Ferrero Rocher and Ghirardelli chocolates on the other. Before I can decide whether to buy a bag of kale chips, I arrive in front of the first set of clerks. I present my passport—still valid for voting in Texas—and sign my name in the record book.

As I wait for a booth to open, I overhear an anxious woman telling the clerks that she has her driver's license, but not her voter-registration card. Will she have to vote provisionally? Will it count if she does? She's fine, the clerks assure her; it's the photo ID she needs under the new law, not the registration card. A machine opens up, and I vote. The whole process takes less than 15 minutes—just enough time for my husband to fill the car with gas and buy a Coke.

My seamless experience was more the rule than the exception in Austin, Durham, Milwaukee, and most of the country. Serious glitches and technical malfunctions caused problems in a handful of jurisdictions around the country. But after the hullaballoo of the fall, this year's elections were remarkable, in the end, for being so unremarkable, at least as far as the voting process was concerned. But, then, that is always the goal for the people behind the ballot box, Successful elections, says Durham's Michael Perry, are the ones where "the newspaper stories the following day are about the candidates and not about the board of elections and how the election was conducted. If we do our jobs right, we're behind the scenes."

Turnout was not as high as any of the officials I had been following had hoped it would be—about the same as it was in 2010 in Travis County, a bit lower in Durham, and a bit higher in Milwaukee. For all the officials' high-tech tools, they have no way to measure the reasons why people stay away—or how much impact new voting laws, and the controversy swirling around them, may have had.

But there's not much time to speculate. The voting is over, but the election is not. On Nov. 5, when I reach Milwaukee's Neil Albrecht, he estimates that he won't have everything finalized until the end of December. His staff has to reconcile poll books, enter same-day registrations into the voter rolls, and run a complete audit of the election to see what worked and what didn't. Then it's on to 2016, by which time Wisconsin's voter-ID law will likely be in place. At least next time, Albrecht says, he'll have two years to get everyone ready. But his fondest hope is that, by then, this era of politicizing and litigating election rules might be over. "I think the country would be heading in a very unfortunate direction," he says, "if we lose track of how every person should have the right to vote in an election." And with that, he says, it's time to get back to work.

Abby Rapoport is a writer in Austin.