An anxious America, weary from a vitriolic campaign season and worried about the state of the nation’s democracy, is voting with determination, with roughly 75 million people having cast ballots in the early voting period.

In North Carolina, nearly 4.5 million voters set an early in-person voting record in the state amid devastation from Hurricane Helene. Georgia voters also set a record with four million voters casting an early ballot. In Pennsylvania, 1.7 million people voted by mail amid increasingly caustic litigation over whose mail ballots should count. Nine states have seen more than 50 percent of eligible voters already vote.

Projections from early voting indicate that the overall turnout for the election will probably be between the roughly 60 percent of eligible voters who turned out in 2016 and the two-thirds of eligible voters who voted in 2020, according to Michael McDonald, a professor of politics at the University of Florida who tracks voting. While overall turnout is likely to be slightly lower than the modern high-water mark set in the 2020 election, it still puts the country on pace for a historical high compared with almost all other previous years.

As the nation enters one of the most consequential weeks in recent political history, with swaths of Americans nervous about nearly every aspect of the electoral process, officials across the country have mounted a furious effort to shore up the election, including by introducing new protections for their own safety.

Much of their worry stems from the violent culmination of the 2020 presidential race at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This year, former President Donald J. Trump is working from a familiar playbook, spreading falsehoods about the election and claiming that Democrats are “a bunch of cheats.”

Election officials have already faced some significant tests. A key county in Pennsylvania failed to deliver thousands of mail ballots to voters, while another county in the state was found to have erroneously turned away voters before a deadline. Russian interference was uncovered in Georgia. Partial passwords for election machines were breached in Colorado.