More than 50,000 workers have taken time off for virus-related reasons, slowing mail delivery. The Postal Service doesn’t test employees or check their temperatures, and its contact tracing is erratic.

Two months out from Election Day, Facebook’s changes to its political ad rules cause additional problems for the government officials running the vote.

While the social media giant says it opposes voter suppression, the data shows a stark picture: Nearly half of all top-performing posts that mentioned voting by mail were false or misleading.

Postal delays and mistakes have marred primary voting, and after years of budget cuts and plant closures, mail delivery has slowed so much that ballot deadlines in many states are no longer realistic.

The Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups warn, with little evidence, that voting by mail fosters fraud. But some Republican secretaries of state reject those concerns and see no alternative to absentee voting if the pandemic persists.

All vote by mail systems are not created equal. In Wisconsin, a vote cast in one town would have been rejected in another. In Florida, young voters’ ballots are most likely to be tossed.

States may shift primary dates, but only Congress can change the federal elections. We spoke to an elections expert to learn what you need to know about how coronavirus could affect the way voters cast their ballots in November.

Here are tips and ideas about what local reporters should find out about their local election systems before Nov. 3 to make sure people who should be able to vote can cast a ballot.

Our analysis found that websites in dozens of towns and counties voting on Super Tuesday have security weaknesses. Richmond, Va., still uses software from 2003.

In 2018, Facebook and Twitter decided to play a role in helping people register to vote in what promised to be a momentous midterm election. To do so, the social media platforms directed users almost exclusively to a website called TurboVote, run by a nonprofit organization known as Democracy Works. TurboVote was launched in 2012, and it promised to streamline voter registration and remind people to cast ballots on Election Day.

Evidently, things did not go seamlessly.

Since we launched our Facebook Political Ad Collector project in fall 2017, more than 16,000 people have participated in it. They all agreed to install a browser plug-in that anonymously sent us the ads they see when they browse Facebook. We used that data to understand and report on how political messaging on Facebook works, and how the system is being gamed to manipulate the public discourse.

Election Day in America brought its familiar mix of misery and allegations of mischief: Aging voting machines crashed; rain-soaked citizens stood in endless lines; laws that many regarded as attempts to suppress turnout among people of color led to both confusion at the polls and angry calls for recounts and investigations.

If the defining risk of Election Day 2016 was a foreign meddling, 2018’s seems to have been a domestic overload. High turnout across the country threw existing problems — aging machines, poorly trained poll workers and a hot political landscape — into sharp relief.

Melanie Taylor arrived at her polling place in a Charleston, South Carolina, church at 7:30 a.m., only to find more than 100 people in line ahead of her. Some of them had already been waiting since 6:15. The voting site was using a computerized login for the first time, and the system was down.

Voters reported waits of an hour and longer on Election Day in areas ranging from the Gulf coasts of Texas and Florida to parts of Missouri and South Carolina, up to Chicago, rural central Pennsylvania and New York City. Polling places opening late, voting machine outages, understaffing and sheer volume caused some voters to abandon the lengthy lines before casting their ballots.

In the Houston area, voters waited over half an hour for polls to open as staff struggled to get voting machinery online. Voters who were late for their jobs left polling places in Brooklyn as high turnout and downed ballot scanners led to waits of up to two hours.

Polls have barely opened on the East Coast, and voting machines — and people — are already causing a few foul-ups. Experts say that the errors are normal, and that none that have emerged so far should prevent voters from casting a ballot.

“There are literally hundreds of thousands of voting machines being set up, mostly by volunteer poll workers, and sometimes there are problems,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Most important thing is for the poll workers to contact their local election officials, who are most likely expecting some issues and will be ready to send help.”

In a rush of preparation for this year’s midterm elections, scores of state and local governments have been working to safeguard their election systems from being hacked or otherwise compromised.

At the same time, according to interviews with more than a dozen national, state and local election officials, the federal commission responsible for providing assistance to them has either been missing in action or working to thwart their efforts.

During three weeks of early voting, many of the problems Electionland has identified have been driven by higher-than-expected turnout. While experts say we won’t know if this means record-breaking turnout on Election Day, early voting in some states has already outpaced 2014, leaving election administrators struggling to keep up.

“There are two scenarios: One is that it’s been an unprecedented number of early voters, and the next is that it’s an equally historic Election Day,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies voter turnout. He said that while we won’t know which is correct until Election Day, “all signs” point to higher turnout on Tuesday. “We’ve never seen this level of engagement during a midterm election,” he said.

If that happens, experts say, voters are likely to see problems at the polls that are common when turnout exceeds expectations — long lines, malfunctioning machines and new voters confused by increasingly obscure election laws.