As of last night, some three million voters in the state of Georgia had cast their ballots, as they rushed to the early voting stations in record numbers.
About 42% of the active voters in the state have already voted, with a week left to polling day.
Authorities expect a record number of voters will turnout by the time polls close. They also expect challenges to the result, especially if it is as close as last time.
Bill Clinton won Georgia for the Democrats in 1992.
The next time a Democrat won this state was four years ago, when Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by a margin of 0.3%, which is pretty much the definition of a narrow victory.
But the number that is most associated with that outcome is 11,780.
That is the number of votes Donald Trump told the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger he needed to find in a phone call on 2 January, 2021.
Mr Raffensperger stood his ground, and said the result was the result.
Mr Trump wanted to change the Georgia electors for the electoral college vote from Mr Biden electors to a group of people who were pledged to vote for him.
The so-called "Fake Electors" scheme was planned in several states - enough to give Mr Trump the 270 electoral college votes he needed to retain the presidency.
On 6 January, 2021, the day Congress met to formally count and ratify the votes of the electoral college, then vice president Mike Pence was chairing the meeting of Congress in a Constitutionally prescribed role.
Mr Pence refused to admit any of the "Fake Electors" lists to the count.
Mr Trump was holding a rally outside the White House, apparently to put pressure on Mr Pence.
That rally turned into the attack on the US Capitol.
Mr Trump was impeached, for the second time, as a result. The phone call to Mr Raffensperger featured in the case against Mr Trump (which was defeated in the US Senate).
The phone call also featured in the Grand Jury indictment of Mr Trump and 18 co-defendants in the state of Georgia.
The case was almost derailed by allegations of an improper relationship between Ms Willis and one of her deputies, hired in specially for the Trump prosecution.
He fell on his sword, and Ms Willis lived to fight on, albeit wounded. And the case was delayed long enough for the US Supreme Court to issue its ruling on presidential immunity.
Last week, the judge hearing the case tossed out three of the charges against Mr Trump, but the rest are still in there.
Three co-defendants have pleaded guilty in return for the dropping of more serious charges.
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The case continues - it may come to trial next year. Unless Mr Trump wins next week.
In which case it will be shelved under the convention that sitting presidents are not charged in the US courts.
So clearly that call to Mr Raffensperger is the most notorious bit of presidential tape since the days of Richard Nixon. And it continues to reverberate in US politics.
Next week's election is expected to be another extremely close affair here in Georgia. Early voting is open, and the residents are voting in record numbers.
There have been changes to the system of voting and counting votes in the state since 2021, all of it presided over by Mr Raffensperger, who was re-elected as Secretary of State with an overwhelming majority, voters of both parties approving his straight dealing in the 2020 election.
Describing himself as "a lifelong conservative Republican", and an engineer by profession, Mr Raffensperger delivered what he says is "the largest implementation of voting machines in the history of this country, on time and on budget".
He is the first Secretary of State to pass legislation requiring photo ID for all forms of voting.
And yet he and his family have also been subjected to death threats, and when we met in Atlanta, an armed officer was present during our interview.
My first question to him was the obvious one - does he expect another phone call from Mr Trump after the election?
He replied: "You never know what people want to do, but they will have the same answer we had last time: here's what the results are.
"And if the other candidate calls me, I'll give them the same results too. At the end of the day, we're going to have a fair, honest and accurate election."
The day before we had filmed at an early voting centre at a public library in central Atlanta.
With signs warning that only US citizens were allowed to vote, and two very big pages of voting instructions and violation penalties on display, voters lined up to prove their identity, which was done swiftly on a new electronic system, linking to driver license and "Real ID" government identity records.
That allowed them to get a voter ID card, which "unlocked" access to the voting machine, a touch screen unit, where they made their selection in the races relevant to their home address.
This was then printed out with a machine readable QR code, and a human readable list.
That printed ballot paper was then deposited into the ballot box - by passing it through an optical scanner which reads the QR code and the human readable paper.
Thus counting the votes electronically for instant release on the night of 5 November, but also preserving the paper ballots for audit afterwards.
Voters we spoke to - mostly Harris voters - said they had no fears about the integrity of the voting system.
Mr Raffensperger said he was confident about the system in place in 2020, but had made it even more secure with the changes.
He said: "It's just continual process improvement. Now we have voter ID for the absentee voting process for the signature match system we were using before it had been sued by the Democrats and Republicans saying it was subjective.
"So we layered on top of that driver's license number, which takes it back to photo ID, and we're real ID compliant, which means that only American citizens are on a voter list, which is clean and accurate.
"We've identified people voting absentee, we also have put in some measures to make sure that the lines stay shorter, so we don't have long lines on election day.
"Now the results have to be recorded for all the early voting that we have no later than 8pm on election day. Everything we've done is to improve the process, but also really speed up the response time."
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Next week he says the results will be available on election night, with only overseas military ballots to come in later - by which he means a Friday 5pm deadline.
But if the number of outstanding military ballots are fewer in number than the difference between the candidates on election night, then it will be possible to call the state pretty much immediately.
Assuming the machines do not break down.
The system had a test during the 2022 mid-term elections, which included a hard-fought Senate race, which was won by the Democrats.
But back in 2020, the outcome was plagued by all kinds of allegations of malfeasance, trickery and fraud.
This delayed final outcomes, but in the end none of the claims stood up.
Mr Raffensperger recounts some of the claims about the election: "There weren't 10,315 dead people. There were four.
"There were no underage voters, even though they said there were 66,000.
"They said there were 2,400 foreign registered voters. There were zero. They said there's over 2,076 felons who voted. There was less than 74 - things like that.
"So, every allegation we checked out, and none of it ever was true. They said that something happened down at State Farm arena, that the two poll workers were double scanning the ballots.
"That had been reviewed by our investigators, by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"And then, if that wasn't good enough for anyone, President Trump actually handpicked a fellow named Bobby Christine.
"He was a US Attorney from Savannah, Georgia. He came up and investigated, and he said there was nothing there. He's now a local DA in Columbia County, and I put his quotes in my book 'Integrity Counts', because I thought it was important.
"But that gets lost in the noise: on a good day, we had 44,000 Twitter followers. But someone else had 75 million Twitter followers, and so they could spread all sorts of misinformation, disinformation, and just not concede defeat.
"But that wasn't our first rodeo. You have to understand, Stacey Abrams (a Democratic candidate for the Senate) lost in 2018 by 55,000 votes, said the machines broke and she lost kind of due to voter suppression, and she still really hasn't conceded.
"It's this awkward statement she makes. But at the end of the day, she lost in 2018, and still Biden won in 2020.
"Brian Kemp won in 2022 as our governor here, and no one contested those races in 2022. It's going to be fair, honest and accurate, like it always is."
But the ghosts of the 2020 "Fake Electors" scheme, the 11,780 votes and all the bogus claims surrounding the election in Georgia continue to have consequences.
Last week a New York judge ordered former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to hand over his Manhattan apartment and other valuables as compensation to two Georgia election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, he had been found guilty of defaming.
He had accused the two of double counting votes for Mr Biden in the election centre, even producing video from the count centre in which he claimed Ms Freeman could be seen passing a USB drive to Ms Moss, which he claimed contained extra votes for Mr Biden.
Ms Mosse told the 6 January committee her mother had passed her a mint flavoured biscuit.
They were awarded $148 million in damages last year, but Mr Giuliani said he did not have the money.
Also last week the Georgia Supreme court refused to hear a challenge to the new election laws Mr Raffensperger introduced and got legislated in 2021.
The case was brought by the Georgia Election Commission, an official body with a Republican majority.
They wanted changes to the way votes are counted, just two weeks from polling day.
The body, which has four Republican and one Democratic Party members, gained a pro-Trump majority in May, when three new members were appointed.
Mr Trump described the trio as "real pit bulls".
They introduced a series of changes they wanted to make to the way votes are counted.
In the end they were in the State Supreme court just a fortnight before election day, seeking to have the changes implemented.
The commission’s chairman, an executive with the fast food chain Waffle House, denounced the actions of the "pit bulls", saying the body was supposed to implement election law, not write it.
Alicia Hughes, an assistant professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta, said: "I'm tending to agree with Secretary Raffensperger on this one.
"We've got to go with the rules and the law that's in place right now. We ran into an issue with the State Board of Election wanting to implement changes within two weeks of us starting early voting, and that's something that has been summarily denied.
"The Georgia Supreme Court has said that they're not going to take up this matter.
"They've stayed the decision, not determined anything definitively, and as a result of that, there cannot be an appeal to the United States Supreme Court that will be taken up because the State Supreme Court still has jurisdiction and has said it will decide a matter of state law after this election."
Ms Huges expects there will be more challenges to the result after the election.
She thinks the huge amount of money that has rolled into the two campaigns this year means some will inevitably end up in post-election litigation.
"The fun is only just starting," she added.
