Donald Trump has been claiming for days that the election is “rigged” and that mass fraud is not only possible, it's already happening. A quite different perspective came a few weeks ago in a post by Arizona poll worker Sarah Harrison. She explains the reasons the system isn't rigged:

>Polling places aren’t neutral because of law enforcement or government presence — though the Department of Elections does structure and oversee the process. Instead, voting spaces are kept neutral by other citizens, everyday people who agree to staff precincts. There is a small stipend involved, but given the long hours, money isn’t a huge motivator. Most poll clerks and inspectors are, essentially, volunteers. Other countries — Mexico, for example — compel citizens to staff the polls through a random lottery much like jury duty. The U.S. manages to find thousands of citizens freely willing to sit for hours and facilitate the process.

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia filed suit Thursday against the clerk of Cabell County, West Virginia, for not processing online voter registration forms. The deadline for West Virginia citizens to register to vote in November's election was October 18, but the suit alleges that Karen Cole, the Cabell County clerk, refused to process registration applications submitted online, instead sending would-be voters a letter requesting that they fill out a paper application instead. "These additional steps are not required in any other county in West Virginia," the complaint reads. A Cabell County clerk's office employee said that Cole was not in the office today and unavailable to comment on the suit.

This Nov. 8, even if you manage to be registered in time and have the right identification, there is something else that could stop you from exercising your right to vote.

The ballot. Specifically, the ballot’s design.

The third and final debate is tonight — in fact it just started as I'm writing this. Given GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's rhetoric in recent days about the election being "rigged" against him, we can only imagine that subject will come up a few times tonight. We posted this tweet storm earlier this evening to clear a few things up. Here are those tweets in one place.

A veritable superfecta of court decisions related to elections were handed down today:

Georgia: A federal judge just denied a request by the ACLU to force Georgia to extend its registration deadline for the counties affected by Hurricane Matthew.

Even before early voting begins in Florida, a crucial state in the presidential race, more than 750,000 people have voted by mail, according to the state Division of Elections. Republicans make up about 42 percent of the people who have voted by mail, while Democrats account for another 40 percent.

GOP Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has transfixed and alarmed observers by calling for supporters to sign up to watch for vote "rigging." But as The New York Times reports this morning there's no sign that Trump supporters have signed up to do so in any significant numbers.

In most years, poll workers are worried about long lines and folks showing up who aren't in the roll books. But this year they are worried about something worse, something that we haven't seen on Election Day in decades: violence.

NPR's Pam Fessler reported this morning that poll workers across the country are preparing for the worst come Nov. 8. They are on pins and needles after the firebombing of the Republican Party's headquarters in Orange County, N.C., and aren't being made more comfortable by the heavy rhetoric of this campaign.

There are signs that Donald Trump's repeated warnings of a rigged election may be backfiring for the campaign. A blog post by an election researcher says Trump might be helping Democrats.

Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at MIT and noted elections expert, recently published polling evidence to suggest that, at a local level, Republicans' belief regarding whether their vote will count has remained virtually unchanged from 2012, while Democrats have grown more confident - much more confident. A massive 23 points more confident.

It didn't seem like even his staff was taking Donald Trump's cries of election rigging seriously, but today the campaign took steps to show he means business. They have hired Mike Roman — a controversial Republican most known for spreading the video of the New Black Panthers apparently intimidating voters outside a polling place in 2008 — to oversee poll-watching efforts.

The candidate has gone on a Twitter rampage in the last several days, repeatedly insisting that there is mass voter fraud despite no evidence to support that claim. Since the release of the 2008 video, GOP groups have continually used it as evidence that the Left is responsible for intimidating voters.

Georgians flocking to the polls for early voting have been met with long lines, reports GPB News, an Electionland Partner.

In Gwinnett County in northern Georgia, voters told GPB News they waited nearly three hours to vote on Monday. Voters in Macon, in Central Georgia, waited about 20 minutes. But the lines didn't stop a whopping 145,000 voters from casting their ballots in the first two days of early voting in the state.

The ACLU has filed suit against Georgia for failing to extend voter registration in light of Hurricane Matthew. A hearing is set for Wednesday morning. It will be heard by the same judge who, last week, declined to extend the deadline for Chatham County specifically. He did not rule on whether the deadline should be extended for the entire state.

After receiving more than 1,000 complaints from voters during the state's April presidential primary, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has called on the state Board of Elections to "issue clear guidance" regarding provisional balloting procedures (which the state calls "affidavit ballots").

These ballots allow voters whose names do not appear on the rolls but believe they are registered to vote using a provisional ballot, and to have their ballot scrutinized by election officials later. In a letter sent to the board, Schneiderman said "many poll workers are not receiving consistent guidance about their legal obligations with respect to affidavit ballots."

According to the letter, complaints rolled in from Albany, Clinton, Erie, Niagara, Ontario, Westchester, and Suffolk counties during the primaries from voters saying they were denied affidavit ballots even though they believed themselves to be registered. It also says that only New York City's Board of Election Policies properly adhered to the state policy that voters always be given an affidavit ballot if they believed themselves to be registered.

Trump's Alaska team never turned in the biographical information and statement necessary to be included in Alaska's voter guide. The Hill reports that the state's director of elections tried to warn Republican officials about it, including the Republican National Committee, Speaker Paul Ryan and Tucker Babcock, the chairman of the Alaska GOP, but no one responded.

Alaska Dispatch News reported that the Trump campaign's Alaska public relations contact is a former state representative who did time for bribery.

This morning, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump took to twitter to allege widespread voter fraud:

Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016

Marc Elias, an attorney for the Democratic Party, has already won in North Carolina after filing a lawsuit this afternoon to extend voter registration to Oct. 19.

He tweeted this in celebration just after 5 p.m.:

Big win in North Carolina--court extends voter registration deadline until Oct 19 in 36 counties affected by hurricane.

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) October 14, 2016

The win comes literally moments after most large news organizations had gotten wind of the lawsuit. Reuters, for example, had published their piece announcing the existence of the suit only 13 minutes before Elias declared victory.

The North Carolina Democratic Party has sued the state over the voter registration deadline. Yesterday, the Board of Elections announced the state's deadline would remain today, Oct. 14, despite heavy flooding in parts of the state.

Slipping your ballot in an envelope, throwing it in the mail and watching the U.S. Postal Service cart it off is a pretty American thing to do. Until that same ballot returns to you like an Un-American boomerang.

That's what's happening to voters in Monmouth County, N.J., a jumble of towns along the Jersey Shore where — for the second year in a row — a design flaw on ballot envelopes mean the local post office can't process them. Postal machines are supposed to scan bar codes on the envelope, but they were left off. When the machines can't find such a bar code, they look for a printed address, but occasionally the machines read the voter's address instead of the Board of Elections (and so they dutifully send the ballot back to the voter). According to the Asbury Park Press, it's not presently clear how many ballots have been affected.

Now that the problem has been identified, the postal service is setting the envelopes aside to be given to the election board rather than mailing them back to their original senders. Post official officials told the Asbury Park Press that voters who had already received their ballot back could mail them again without additional postage.

It took Nick Alati half a day to cast a ballot in Arizona’s August primary — and his vote didn’t even count.

There are about 200,000 registered U.S. voters living in Israel right now, and all are eligible to vote by absentee ballot. A nonprofit group called IVoteIsrael popped up to help this sometimes confusing process along.

But whether they're actually being helpful is the subject of some debate.

Stricter requirements for mailed absentee ballots in Wisconsin could result in Milwaukee — the state's largest city — tossing out a record number of votes in November. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported on Oct. 7 that the city's election commission could reject thousands of mailed ballots because they lacked an address for the required witness.