This has been a midterm election cycle unlike any other. Wealthy donors spent staggering sums. Both parties moved to redraw congressional district lines. President Donald Trump and his allies relentlessly questioned whether the results could be trusted even before a single ballot was counted. At Trump’s direction, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit that said the federal government would contest any outcome in which Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent in Alaska, was not victorious.

Newsrooms, including ours, have tried to plan how we will cover an election in which the losing side refuses to accept the will of the voters. Was the Alaska lawsuit a single data point or a harbinger?

As we prepare to write about Nov. 3 and beyond, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to game out what might happen in the future — not our strong suit. The record shows that journalists are pretty good at telling readers what happened, particularly if we have some time and some data to sift through, and much less good at forecasting the future.

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ProPublica’s reporters are on the lookout for what’s going right and what isn’t. We’re monitoring voter suppression and interference, election observers and poll watchers, extremism tied to the election, and ICE activity at the polls. Have you seen something?

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And yet we have to plan. Over the past few weeks we have prepared our reporters and editors to cover every scenario we can imagine. None of us have forgotten the chaos of 2020 when Trump was urged by advisers to send the military to seize voting machines in states he had lost. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as lawmakers gathered to certify Joe Biden’s victory underscored the sense that literally anything was possible in the aftermath of elections.

We will have reporters on the ground in 11 key states covering voting, with even more in Washington, D.C.,........

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