From their ninth-floor boardroom in downtown Washington, Edward Hailes and Elizabeth Westfall are surveying four years of preparation.

Butcher’s paper is pasted from one end of the room to the other, scrawled with raw numbers collected from county precincts across the country, part of their group’s efforts to track whether polling places from Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to Hillsborough County, Fla., will have enough workers and voting machines to cope with the expected record turnout today.