Americans are already voting. But election officials don't know what the rules are.

Americans across the country are already voting for president, yet election rules in the states that will decide the next president are still unsettled.

The uncertainty just 46 days out from Election Day — driven in part by lawsuits and proposed rule changes backed by former President Donald Trump or his allies — risks undermining meticulous planning by election officials, who keep having to scramble to respond even as the election is well underway.

Election officials and legal experts warn that changes this close to the election could confuse voters and lay the groundwork for an election loser to cast doubt on the results, like Trump did in 2020. The late changes, they warn, could slow the actual tabulation of ballots and delay results — or even help decide who wins or loses the election.

Perhaps no place is more emblematic of the challenge for election workers than Georgia. On Friday, the State Election Board is considering some drastic changes to how elections are run that state and local officials from both parties warn would throw the battleground state into chaos.

“This is akin to entering the third trimester of pregnancy, nearing the due date,” Travis Doss, the executive director of the Richmond County, Georgia, board of elections, said during the meeting on Friday morning. “Now is simply not the time to implement sweeping changes that could create unnecessary confusion and disruption.”

Yet in a 3-2 vote on Friday, Trump-aligned members of the state board voted to require election officials to hand-count the number of ballots either the night of the election or starting the day after. Local poll workers would not be tallying results but counting the raw number of ballots cast and comparing them to the machine-counted total.

Election officials warn that counties are simply not equipped to build this into their Election Day procedures, creating serious risks of delays and errors that compound — rather than relieve — issues.

Several other rules changes, some with similarly significant consequences, were on the board’s agenda Friday afternoon as well.

The three members of the Georgia elections board who supported the change had been hailed by Trump for their work. During a Georgia rally in August, the former president called them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” Several people who spoke at Friday’s meeting, including election workers, said Trump’s comments had created the impression that these board members were working to benefit Trump, rather than election administration.

The board’s support for the hand-tallying of ballots — among other changes the board is still considering — comes despite near-uniform opposition from election officials in the state. Some told the board that they have long operated with a 90-day “quiet period” before the election to ensure that last-minute rule changes don’t impede the process.

State Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, warned that the passage of any rule changes this close to the election is “disfavored.” Many of the proposed changes “very likely exceed the Board’s statutory authority and in some instances appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections,” his office said. One of the board’s dissenting votes, Chair John Fervier, argued that the rule changes could result in losing litigation — and cause the same dynamic that Trump allies decried in 2020, when state election officials adopted emergency procedures to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

And other critics warned that rules like these were just making it easier for disinformation to spread. Saira Draper, a Democratic state representative from Atlanta, described the board’s rule changes as “a grift,” saying they are intended to cause counties “to fail” in order to stoke future doubts about the integrity of the vote.

This weekend marks a key milestone for this year’s election. By 45 days out, federal law requires states to send ballots to military and overseas voters. Because that falls on Saturday, many election offices across the country are sending ballots out Friday, if they haven’t done so already.

And several states use that deadline to kick off voting for the broader populace. Minnesota, for example — a blue-leaning state that Trump nevertheless contended he could compete in earlier this cycle — began early in-person voting on Friday.

Similarly, North Carolina election officials were required to send military ballots by Friday and are scheduled to send absentee ballots to other voters starting Tuesday. That is happening weeks later than initially planned, after independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. successfully sued to get his name removed, despite the fact ballots were already printed and were being prepared for distribution. But even as ballots go out en masse, uncertainty remains about some rules in key swing states, raising the possibility that an incredibly close election could come down to esoteric arguments in courtrooms over which ballots to count.

In Pennsylvania, the biggest of the battleground states, a fight has raged for years over whether to count mail ballots that voters return with missing or incorrect dates on the envelopes. That’s expected to continue, potentially after Election Day, after the state Supreme Court punted on the issue late last week.

The high court overturned a lower court ruling that those ballots must be counted. But instead of issuing a definitive ruling, it vacated the decision on procedural grounds — all but guaranteeing a lawsuit will return over the issue.

State law requires voters to sign and date the envelope when voting by mail, but thousands of voters each year either forget to do so or write down dates such as their birth dates. Democrats and voting rights groups have sued repeatedly to have those ballots counted — arguing that the date is immaterial, since ballots must be in election officials’ possession by the close of polls to count — while Republicans have worked to have them rejected.

Some of the most significant challenges for election officials this cycle have been due to Kennedy and other third-party candidates jockeying to get on or off ballots in several states. Kennedy unsuccessfully sought to have his name removed from swing state ballots after he dropped out. Election officials warned that his requests — and then lawsuits — came too late in the process and would either significantly delay mail ballots or risk introducing significant errors into the tabulation process.

Wisconsin’s election commission, for example, denied Kennedy’s request to get off the ballot there in late August — and he is now asking state courts to order election officials to either remove his name or cover it up with a sticker. On Friday, the state Supreme Court announced that it will bypass lower courts and hear the case directly. Scott McDonell, the clerk of Dane County, Wisconsin, noted that some ballots have already gone out across the state. And he called it a “terrible idea” to even be considering putting stickers on ballots that could wreak havoc with vote tabulating machines.

“The machines have not been tested with stickers. They act like stickers are uniform, ” he said. “Where am I supposed to source these stickers? … Do they peel off? You could be compromising how these machines count if these stickers come off.”