It's expected that former Vice President Joe Biden will have no trouble winning Massachusetts in Tuesday's election. A Republican presidential nominee hasn't carried the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Things tend to be tighter to our north, in New Hampshire. GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath spoke with reporter Edgar B. Herwick III, who's been in the Granite State. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire in a very tight race in 2016 there. Polls show that it's tight again this year, right?

Edgar B. Herwick III: Yeah, that's right. So I'm currently in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Manchester is in Hillsborough County. Trump won Hillsborough County by less than 500 votes in 2016.

I've been here for a few days now. I've done a lot of driving and walking around the Manchester area, and I would say anecdotally that it appears like it will be close here again tomorrow. There are a lot of the sort of signs that either campaign might distribute, but also handmade signs both for Trump and for Biden, pretty common all over the place.

Trump was in this area a little over a week ago and had a rally on the Londonderry-Manchester border. I attended that. That was not this past Sunday, but the Sunday before. As Trump supporters will say, there was a lot of enthusiasm on the ground at that rally. There were thousands of people. You know, it happened on a Sunday at 1 p.m., and the closest way I could describe it is that it felt like a tailgate before a football game. There were a lot of people, there was a lot of enthusiasm.

Now, Biden is ahead in the polls here, but the Trump campaign does believe that this state and its four electoral votes are still in play. We know that in a close election like this one appears to be, four electoral votes could really make a difference.

Rath: Absentee voting has been expanded all across the country, that's a big storyline this year. Is that the case in New Hampshire? Are a lot of people voting by mail?

Herwick: Yeah. A lot of people have. All told, they've had roughly 180,000 absentee ballots, as they call them here, which have been returned. And actually this morning, I was at a polling location in Londonderry — in fact, the only polling location in Londonderry — the Londonderry High School Gym. Now, why I was there today ahead of Election Day is that they were actually doing what they call pre-processing the mail-in ballots that they have just received, which was about 5,000 ballots. Now, the pre-processing consists of basically taking the ballots out of outer envelope and inspecting the inner envelope, which needs to have a signature on it, for example. So I spoke with Londonderry Town Manager Jonathan Kipp, who was there overseeing the pre-processing.

"It speeds up the process for us, because of the overwhelming number of absentees." said Kipp. "But another benefit of it is when we identify a ballot that has to be rejected — for example, they forgot to sign the inner envelope — it gives us an opportunity to contact a voter and allow them time to remedy it."

Kipp told me that this was happening, that they had contacted a number of voters who either hadn't signed their inner envelope or there was no inner envelope. And he said at least one voter, they had gotten a hold of that person had come down and "cured" their ballot. Curing your ballot basically means just making it right ahead of Election Day. It's really important to note this sort of pre-processing. This is something that's happening here in New Hampshire. It's also happening in Massachusetts on a town by town basis. Towns in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire this year have been allowed to choose to pre-process these ballots.

But this is not universal across the 50 states. So, you heard Kipp say it speeds up the process for us. Now, none of those ballots are being cast today, but they are being prepared to be cast tomorrow. Tomorrow, they'll actually remove the ballots from the inner envelope and feed them into machines. Of course, all of that takes time. The pre-processing not only allows them to give voters an opportunity to cure votes, but it puts them in a position to be able to count votes faster tomorrow. Now, other four states, including crucial states in this election, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — by their state laws, they're not allowed to pre-process any of their ballots until tomorrow. So this is one of the main reasons why a lot of people are expecting we're not necessarily going to have results tomorrow night, because that pre-processing can't even begin to take place in a number of states until tomorrow.

Rath: It's not just the White House, but control of the Senate that's at stake. New Hampshire is one of the places where it's actually an incumbent Democrat, Jeanne Shaheen, who is on the ballot there. She's being challenged by a Republican, Corky Messner. Is that race close?

Herwick: The polls suggest that Shaheen is ahead, and ahead by a wider margin than it appears in the polls that Biden is ahead. But her campaign folks, of course, told me they're taking absolutely nothing for granted. There was a mini-rally with Jeanne Shaheen and a number of the other Democrats on the ballot here in New Hampshire who gathered out at a Democrat field office. There were about a hundred volunteers. These are the folks who are going to be making phone calls, sending texts, knocking on doors tonight and through the day tomorrow to try to get the vote out.

Shaheen adressed the crowd. "Are you cold?" said Shaheen? "Are you ready to go? Are you ready to win? Are you ready to get the vote out? With your help, we will be successful. Don't let anybody tell you different. Get everybody out to vote, because if everybody votes and every vote is counted, we are going to win. Make sure all your friends and your neighbors and your family and everybody in your social networks know what's at stake. Together we will be successful. Thank you all very much."

I should also mention that New Hampshire's other senator, who is a Democrat, Maggie Hassin, was also at this mini-rally, and she was really underscoring the importance of the efforts tonight and tomorrow to get out every vote. Hassan won her seat in 2016 by just 716 votes out of more than 700,000 that were cast, so that was an incredibly close race that put her in the U.S. Senate, so she was really underscoring the fact that these volunteers should not take any votes for granted.

Rath: You mentioned that Shaheen is up by a margin bigger than Biden has over over Trump. Is there any sense that Shaheen could help Biden in New Hampshire?

Herwick: Her campaign folks were very clear to me that they are not taking a single vote for granted. The polls are the polls, but they have work to do. But, yeah, they did say that there maybe is sort of coattails in the opposite direction effect that could be happening here, which is to say folks who are motivated to to vote for Jeanne Shaheen, they certainly do hope that might give Joe Biden a lift in what appears to be a close race.

Rath: Give us a quick sketch of tomorrow. Will they start the second stage of processing those mail-ins right away?

Herwick: Yes. Tomorrow the polls will be open as usual here, and there's a few things to note about New Hampshire.

So while they have set records in terms of how many absentee ballots have been cast, how many mail-in votes have been cast, it's not at the scale that we've seen in, say, Massachusetts, for example. So one thing is, they don't have any early in-person voting here in New Hampshire. But in Massachusetts, it's close to about 50 percent of registered voters who have either voted early or voted by mail heading into Election Day. Here in New Hampshire, the mail-in ballots total somewhere more like 25 or 30 percent of registered voters, so they do expect that the polls are going to be pretty busy tomorrow on Election Day. There won't have been as many votes cast as there will be in a state like, say, Massachusetts.

There's another interesting thing here in New Hampshire, a little quirk. One of the things I've learned in covering this election is just how different each state is in the details of how they run their elections. Even when we're voting for president, those elections are run by 50 different states, and here in New Hampshire, voters can register to vote on Election Day and then cast a ballot. So part of the get out the vote effort tomorrow won't just be trying to get registered voters to the polls, but also trying to get folks who have yet to register, who might be motivated to go to the polls, register, and vote.

Of course like we will be in Massachusetts, they're going to be processing, actually casting all of those mail-in votes at polling locations. They'll also be handling in-person votes as they normally would. It should be said, again, I just sort of mentioned, that every state does it a little differently. They also report results a little differently. This is a case where Massachusetts and New Hampshire are pretty similar, which is to say that they will be at a polling location like the one in Londonderry, they'll be processing mail-in votes, they'll be handling actual voters, but until both of those things are done, they won't tally up the total and release results.

So when you get results in New Hampshire and when you get results in Massachusetts, through the evening tomorrow, those results will be a mix of the absentee ballots that have been counted and the in-person votes which have been put out. In some of the other states, you have to be careful as results are coming out to be aware of which of those votes have come out, because in some states, they'll release the mail-in totals first and then election results later, or vice versa. So it's going to be a long election night for all of us, I suspect, but it should be an exciting one, as well.