The political calendar says Joe Biden and Donald Trump have, as of Sunday, exactly 100 days left to convince Americans they’re the right man to be president. In reality, both have far less time before many voters make their decision. The 2020 election is widely expected to feature a higher concentration of votes cast before the November 3 Election Day than any modern presidential election, driven by rule changes that have loosened restrictions on early absentee voting and a pandemic that has scared many people from casting their ballots in person. In many key battleground states, millions of voters are expected to submit their ballots in September – while nearly all of them could see a surge of votes as many as four weeks ahead of the big day. The earlier voting will challenge campaigns for both Biden and Trump in unprecedented ways, testing their ability to adapt to the new-found conditions while reaching out and educating their voters about how to now cast ballots. For Trump, trailing Biden by double-digits in some national polls of the race, early voting could truncate the amount of time he has left to stage a comeback, underscoring the need for him to begin making up ground on the former vice-president sooner rather than later. “You don’t want to be peaking the fourth week of October,” said David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. “You want to make sure all the things you want to have said really are out by the end of September.” What happens if Trump refuses to concede defeat in the 2020 US election? “A bunch of people will have voted by the first debate,” he added, referring to an event scheduled for September 28 at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Of the six core presidential battleground states, five of them – North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida – will begin sending postal votes to voters who requested them in September. As soon as the ballots are received, voters can return them through the mail. The lone state that won’t allow voters to submit ballots in September, Arizona, begins early voting and sending postal votes through the mail on the same day, October 7. No battleground state lets voters submit their ballot sooner than North Carolina, which will begin shipping mail-in postal votes to people who requested them on September 4, nearly two full months before Election Day. Mike Rusher, a Republican operative there, expects absentee balloting to swell from about 5 per cent of the total vote in the last general election to nearly 30 per cent, which means voters can expect more intensive outreach in August and September. “Early money spent will be of great benefit now,” Rusher said. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, mail-in ballots skyrocketed during this year’s primaries by more than four times the number in 2016. Democratic Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania is leading a public education campaign to let his constituents know that applying to vote by mail takes as long as making the bed or preparing a bowl of cereal. Anti-China rhetoric is not just US election bluster this time around Voting early has been a key feature of recent presidential elections, and the challenge they pose to each presidential campaign is, at a certain level, nothing new. But what’s changed this year is an electorate, worried about contracting coronavirus showing a deep aversion to the traditional process of casting a ballot at a local polling place, favouring instead to submit their ballot through the mail. The effect of that aversion has already been dramatic. In Wisconsin’s April primary, held during a surge of Covid-19 cases in the state, 60 per cent of voters voted absentee through the mail, according to Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Normally, he said, absentee voting through the mail makes up about 6 per cent of the vote. But moving to a mail-in system presents risks. For instance, in Wisconsin, one analysis found that an estimated 23,000 primary ballots were thrown out because voters missed at least one line on the form, rendering them invalid. “Those numbers from the primary scare me. That’s a lot of votes to be spoiled in an election,” said Plouffe, who urged Democrats to embark on a full-fledged campaign to inform voters of all that’s required to make sure ballots are converted into actual votes. “If it’s a state where postage is required, make sure they’re aware of that. If it’s a state where they have to sign both the ballot and the envelope, they’re aware of that. The deadlines. It is just a really high degree of difficulty.” Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst, said: “I do think it’s safe to say that a majority of votes will be cast before Election Day … with the majority of those coming by mail.” Biden puts Russia ‘on notice’ over interference in US election Trump’s assertion that a mail-in surge would lead to “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history”, has undoubtedly made it more difficult for Republicans to fully embrace and emphasise the process. Biden even predicted last week that Trump would use it as an excuse to “steal the election”. Glen Bolger, a Republican Party pollster, said in one recent survey of a battleground state, he found that 27 per cent of all voters reported they planned to vote by mail. But of those 27 per cent of all voters, fully 75 per cent planned to support Biden – compared to just 15 per cent who said they would back Trump. Waiting until Election Day to vote is risky, the pollster said, because unexpected events could thwart someone’s plan to cast their ballot, and even reductions in turnout could have big consequences. “That’s something you have to work to fix, because you don’t want to leave votes on the table because there’s a spike in the virus right around election time, or there’s a patch of bad weather,” Bolger said. Non-partisan election officials caution that counting votes would take longer than past elections. Postal votes take longer to process than ballots cast in person. “I think we need to manage expectations, in terms of it probably not being an early election night,” said Magney, the spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Events outside the control of campaigns, developments abroad and at home, can also shake the final weeks of a campaign. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton said she “was on the way to winning” the White House until then-FBI Director James Comey announced on October. 28 that he might reopen the investigation into her use of a personal email server when she was secretary of State. That ignited an issue Trump already had been pressing. He then prevailed in the Electoral College after winning three crucial states by the narrowest of margins. And in 2008, the collapse of Lehman Brothers spiralled into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, dominated media coverage of the final weeks of the campaign and fuelled critical coverage of President George W. Bush and his party’s nominee to succeed him, Republican John McCain. A campaign that had been deadlocked when the investment banking firm filed for bankruptcy on September 15 ended up as a rout for Democrat Barack Obama in November. Last week, Trump repeated his claim that efforts are under way to “rig the election”. Then he went further. Asked on Fox News if he would accept the results, as every president before him has, Trump said this: “I have to see”. Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse