Yes, they call this event The Red Mirage. It generates a lot of fear because Trump is counting on this happening. It is true that the numbers are running anywhere from twice as many to four times as many Democrats are requesting mail-in ballots than Republicans depending on where in the country the requests are being made. This balances out to the idea that more Republicans will actually be voting in person. 

The Trump plan is that if on election night he is showing leads in states where the polling has all been against him, he will quickly declare victory, unleash Bill Barr and a massive number of lawyers, and immediately begin trying to stop ballot  counting and begin throwing out ballots by the hundreds of thousands. He will also ask his right wing extremist supporters to begin a onslaught of pure mayhem. 

This is a pretty dangerous and potentially effective plan, particularly if his extremist followers go along with creating violence in the streets which causes polling places to be shut down, or they begin trying to burn them to the ground/blow them up to prevent counting the ballots.

The reason this plan is so important to Trump is that he and the Republicans know due to the number of people voting by mail the best case scenario is that it will take a week to ten days after the election to have an accurate tally of the votes. Potentially longer as it could go two to three weeks and as this is happening the polling places will be swamped with Trump lawyers and Republican operatives that will be trying to slow the vote counting by challenging every ballot before it can be counted. Mail-in ballots are not allowed to be open and counted until election day. So, despite sending them early, these remain sealed and uncounted until November 3. 

This is why Trump has been throwing out there the idea that we will "never know" who won because their intent is to slow vote counting to a standstill so they can force the election into the courts.

Now, that's the election day and after part of this. The truth is Trump and the Republicans already have swamped polling places with lawyers and have filed lawsuits all over the country in different states. Now they appear to have lost in suing Pennsylvania but they won in Iowa where a judge agreed to throw out over 150,000 ballots from two districts that vote heavily for Democrats. More than 95,000 ballots have been thrown out in Johnson county alone which is a Democratic stronghold in Iowa. 

Why were these ballots thrown out? Well, because the people sending the ballots followed the rules that Republicans had requested be followed. First you get a ballot request form in the mail which is addressed specifically to the individual voter. It has the voter's name, address, and voter ID number on it. You sign that and send it back and then they mail you the actual ballot, again specifically addressed to the voter with that voter's name, address, and voter ID number on it. You then make your selections on the ballot, sign it, place it in the special envelope, place that in another envelope, then mail it back or drop it off at a drop off location or polling place. It's a secure and safe process that assures that the intended registered voter is the one that receives and returns the ballot.

Only one ballot is sent out specifically to the registered voter. So, there are not, as Trump idiotically claims "millions of random ballots" floating around sent out blank that anybody can fill out. They only send a ballot to a registered voter and that vote is counted ONCE based on the name and voter ID number. Once your voter ID and name are counted that's it, you can't vote again and send in more ballots. You can't have someone sitting in a warehouse just mailing in random ballots. This is why for years we have had mail-in voting and it was never an issue and there are no fraud issues with it.

So, what did the Republicans do in their lawsuit? They said that because the ballots had information on them that was "prefilled in", meaning name, address, and voter ID number, that these ballots must be invalidated. So, the exact thing that Republicans had requested years ago be part of keeping mail-in ballots secure...now they used to have ballots thrown out.

You can't make this stuff up! And this lawsuit has a duel purpose. Now because over 150,000 votes in Iowa have been tossed out the lawyers will challenge votes being counted on election day because they will claim that potentially someone could have voted twice...because their first ballot may have been thrown out or may have gone through and there is no way to know without challenging (and by doing that slowing counting) every damn vote.

So, we certainly have a massive uphill climb here with this election. Throwing out 150,000 votes in Iowa could certainly change the outcome of the election there, not just for Trump, but also for the incumbent Republican senator there that is losing to her Democratic challenger in the polling right now.

This election is going to be turned into a giant mess, by our president and the Republicans. It will come down to if states maintain control of their elections and believe me it won't be easy.