They need to stop referring to this as counting the ballots before election day. They will be processing the ballots and feeding them into the electronic tabulator. These tabulators don’t give you a result until you are finished at the end of the day on Tuesday. Maine has been processing ballots before election day for years in the larger municipalities. They don’t push the report button until all the ballots have been fed into the machine. That is always well after 8 pm on election day.
How could this possibly go wrong?