Election Day: Expect a late night and a fight.

  Before the results are in, President Trump is already promising a legal challenge to the vote in states where mail ballots may be counted for several days after election day.

  Because of the crush of mail ballots, there may be no declarable winner tonight, even if the numbers suggest there is one. What Trump says and does tonight and tomorrow in the face of uncertainty, or even loss, may determine whether there is violence in parts of the country. The White House is preparing for trouble. Last night they built a “non-scalable” fence around the compound.

  Stores and offices in some cities have been boarding up windows.

  Feeding the potential is the President. “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election,” Trump said in Charlotte, North Carolina. I think it’s a terrible thing.” 

  So far, the legal decisions have gone against Trump and the Republicans. A federal judge in Texas ruled yesterday that 128,000 ballots deposited at drive-through locations in heavily Democratic Harris County. 

  Trump promised, “We’re going in the night of … as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” Decrying how millions of Americans have legally cast their vote, Trump said, “If people wanted to get their ballots in they should have gotten their ballots in long before that … they don’t have to put their ballots in the same day, they should have put their ballots in a month ago.”

  Trump tweeted last night that  the court decision extending Pennsylvania “will allow rampant and unchecked cheating” and “will also induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!”

 Twitter put a user violation warning on it.

Closing Time: The news agencies don’t report results until after the polls close in the West, but among the first to come out will be Florida, where polls close four hours before California.

   Here are closing times in critical states, all in Eastern Standard Time:

-7, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina

-7:30, Ohio

-8, Pennsylvania, Florida panhandle

-9, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, Minnesota

-10, Iowa

-11 pm, California 

The Long Count: Florida counts early and absentee ballots before election day so expect to hear reliable results from them soon after the news agencies start reporting results. They might have a nearly full count.

  North Carolina and Ohio also count ballots before election day.

  Not so with Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, states that don’t start  processing mail ballots until election day. It may take a day or two for those states to have final numbers.

  Expect a confusing evening with ups and downs. The early vote appears to have been as much as 2-1 Democrat, possibly skewing the early reports of results. If predictions hold true, millions of Republicans have held their vote to cast it in person today. 

Paths of Glory: If Joe Biden wins Florida, it’s a strong indication that he will win the Presidency, but that’s not the end of it. Biden leads by an average of 1.7 percent in Florida, well within the margin for error. Some polls have him higher, others say he trails the President.

 Next up is Pennsylvania, where Biden leads by an average of  2.9 points, but three out of nine recent polls have him trailing.

  If Biden takes back the so-called “Blue Wall” from Trump — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — it’s pretty much over for Trump, particularly if Biden also takes Florida. Biden is up by an average of  6.6 in Wisconsin and 5.1 in Michigan. Pretty comfortable.

The Senate: The Republican/Democrat split is 53/45 with two Independents who vote with the Democrats. So call it 53/47. 

   The Democrats are going to lose their seat in Alabama, occupied by the Democrat Doug Jones in a special election against the religious nut Roy Moore. That was an aberration.

  That makes it in reality 55/47. So the Democrats need to flip three Republican seats to break even and have — if they win the presidency — Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie breaking vote on legislation.

  The big targets for the Democrats are Maine, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.

  In Maine, where the mealy-mouthed incumbent Susan Collins is on the ropes, the race is considered a tossup.

  Iowa Republican Joni Ernst also is in danger, but leads by an average of two points in the polls. 

  In North Carolina, insurgent Democrat leads incumbent Thom Tillis by an average of 2.2 percent.

   Georgia has two seats up for grabs and, incredibly, Democrats lead in both races. Democrat Jon Ossoff is up on David Perdue by just .7 percent. But his fellow Democrat, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a preacher at the famous Ebenezer Baptist Church, leads by 15.4 percent.

The Bulletin Board: One person is dead  and 15 injured after a shooting in Vienna, Austria, that has been described as a terrorist incident. — The Supreme Court’s newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett heard her first oral arguments at the  court yesterday. — Campaigning in denial of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump suggested to a crowd that he’s ready to fire the revered epidemiologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.  Trump said, “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election.”

QB VII: The trouble with libel suits is you might lose and prove the case of your critic. A British court has ruled in favor of a newspaper that described weirdo actor Johnny Depp as a “wife beater” who had repeatedly assaulted his former wife, the actress Amber Heard.

  Depp is known as the oddball pirate captain  Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. The legal swordfight isn’t over. Depp is suing Heard in the US for an article she wrote about sexual violence that he claims caused him to be dropped from a movie sequel to “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

 As Jack Sparrow said, “There’ll be no living with her after this.”

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