Arthur York, a thirty-eight-year-old trial lawyer in Atlanta, wanted to vote for Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia. He received a mailer about voting absentee, which Georgia allows all voters to do, and he figured why not? He requested an absentee ballot on October 3rd, but his request was returned, he told me recently, because, according to the secretary of state’s office, his signature didn’t visually match what they had on file. This has been an issue for a number of voters in Georgia: just last week, a federal appeals court sided with the American Civil Liberties Union in a case in which the group argued that the state’s practice of rejecting absentee ballots and applications because of signature-matching concerns is unconstitutional. York sent the application back with a new signature, and “then got an e-mail saying they would send a ballot the next day,” he told me. A hard ballot finally arrived on October 24th, and York mailed it on the 25th, he said, documenting this with photos. “Never heard anything else,” he said.

Nearly four million Georgians voted in Tuesday’s midterm elections, an increase of more than a million people from 2014. Much of this enthusiasm had to do with the high-profile governor’s race, in which Abrams, a Democrat in the Obama mold, faced Brian Kemp, a Trump-echoing Republican. Further dramatizing, and complicating, matters, is that Kemp is the Georgia secretary of state, responsible for overseeing the election. Kemp has been widely criticized for holding onto this dual role; on Tuesday, the nonpartisan nonprofit Protect Democracy filed an injunction, on behalf of five Georgia voters, asking a federal judge to prohibit Kemp from counting ballots. As of Wednesday afternoon, the election remains undecided—and it is likely to remain that way for days or even weeks. Some Georgia counties may not certify their results until next Tuesday.

The latest tally has Kemp leading Abrams by about sixty-five thousand votes, with 50.3 per cent of the vote. Per Georgia rules, Kemp needs one vote more than fifty per cent of the total cast to declare victory—something he was hesitant to do on Tuesday night, instead saying at his election party, in Athens, Georgia, around midnight, “There are votes left to be counted, but we have a very strong lead. And folks, make no mistake: the math is on our side to win this election.” If no candidate receives more than fifty per cent, there will be a runoff between the two highest vote-getters, in December.

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On a conference call with reporters on Wednesday morning, the Abrams campaign offered some different math: if Abrams receives 15,539 of the remaining votes, a campaign spokesperson said, it would trigger a runoff against Kemp, by pushing his percentage below fifty. When I shared this comment on Twitter, Kemp’s press secretary, Cody Hall, appeared to dispute the figure, writing, “Lol.” The arithmetic depends on an estimate of how many votes are still out there, some of which, presumably, will go to Kemp; on Wednesday morning, the Abrams campaign estimated that thousands of provisional ballots and late returns remained, in addition to the more than fifteen thousand absentee ballots that had not yet been counted. (In an Associated Press story published shortly after this one, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office revealed that some twenty-two thousand provisional ballots had not yet been counted. When “pressed by an Associated Press reporter,” the story notes, a Kemp adviser declared victory. In a piece published on Wednesday night, the Web site FiveThirtyEight calculated that Abrams and the third-party candidate in the race, Ted Metz, “would need to net more than 25,000 votes” to force a runoff between Abrams and Kemp.)

There is a separate, albeit related, question, however: Has the election been conducted fairly and properly to this point? “We saw significant irregularities,” Abrams’s campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, said, noting, in particular, “long wait times in Fulton County despite a warehouse with seven hundred machines that stood at the ready.” In Atlanta, on Tuesday, I witnessed multi-hour waits and spoke to people in minority-dominated precincts where polling locations had surprisingly few voting machines. This came on the heels of the secretary of state’s office making a dubious-seeming accusation of “possible cyber crimes” by Georgia’s Democratic Party, and reports of voter intimidation. “There are mail ballots continuing to trickle in, mainly in Gwinnett and Clark counties,” Groh-Wargo said, “but we’re keeping our eyes open statewide.”

She added, “We’re in unprecedented territory here, with the secretary of state being in a race that is too close to call as the chief elections officer of Georgia. We are going to be pursuing all options. We’re working already this morning in all one hundred and fifty-nine counties to make sure Georgians have the ability to vote and have their vote counted.”

Arthur York is one of those Georgians worried that his vote wasn’t counted. On Tuesday, he checked the Georgia secretary of state’s Web site for the status of his ballot and saw that it had been denied due to “signature match.” Just before five o’clock, he e-mailed the secretary of state’s office yet again. “Please provide confirmation that you submitted my ballot,” he wrote. “I honestly cannot believe this is real life.”