The final day of voting in this year’s midterm election s arrived Tuesday against a backdrop of uncertainty after a year in which President Donald Trump has tried to interfere in how states run their election s and sown doubts about the outcome should Republicans lose.
That directive was included in one of two executive orders Trump has signed during his second term that attempted to federalize certain aspects of election s , even though the Constitution gives the states, and some times Congress, the authority to set election rules. A federal judge on Sunday dismissed that lawsuit. The Trump administration has insisted that no armed federal officials would be guarding the polls on Election Day , and on Tuesday, none of the steps Democrats most feared had yet come to pass.
Millions of Americans already cast their ballots, with early voting turnout on pace to eclipse that of the last midterm election s . In contrast to the president’s continued rhetoric about election cheating, voting so far has unfolded with relatively few problems . By afternoon on Election Day , the biggest issues affecting voting were weather -related, with flooding in Florida and parts of the Southwest prompting changes to polling locations and other emergency measures. A problem with ballot scanners also was delaying vote counting — though voting was able to continue — in New York’s suburban Westchester County, part of which is in a U.S. House district with a competitive race. Trump has spent months trying to use the power of the presidency to put his thumb on the scale of this year’s election s , which will determine whether his party keeps control of Congress. His Justice and Homeland Security departments have been involved in a massive hunt for voters who are not U.S. citizens, at one point engaging in a made-for-the-cameras predawn operation that led to more than two dozen arrests in California. At the same time, Trump’s constant false claims about widespread voter fraud led election officials and Democratic groups across the country to plan for the possibility of immigration agents at voting sites or federal officers seizing voting machine s . U.S. “There will be no escape. The agency did not immediately return a request for comment about the post. Polling sites were open Tuesday across much of the country, with few disruptions so far. That required the ballots to be placed in emergency bags for later counting. Election officials stressed that the ballots would remain secure and monitored and that voters could continue casting ballots while they worked to resolve the issue. “You would think they would have tested the machine s . Not ideal. Westchester County Executive Ken Jenkins vowed to launch a bipartisan investigation into what he called a “debacle. He did not have an estimate for how many people left. Heavy rains and flash flooding in a swath of the Southwest were making it harder for some voters to reach polling places in parts of Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Flooding in eight Florida counties also prompted some last-minute polling location changes in the state. Election administrators and voting rights advocates had advised voters casting late absentee ballots to use drop boxes or deliver them to polling places in person rather than mail them. The advice came after concerns emerged that recent changes in U.S. Postal Service operations could result in postmarking delays that would mean mail ballots could not be counted. Late-arriving ballots or late postmarks disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters during this year’s primaries in California, Oregon and Washington, which mail ballots to all voters . The Republican administration’s legal maneuvers have been largely blocked by the courts. One of the Trump administration’s most high-profile attempts to interfere in state election s was turned away Monday night by the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected its push to force California to set aside thousands of ballots as part of its search for noncitizen voters . Even the administration’s own record of arrests and charges has demonstrated what research and state investigations have made clear for years — that instances of noncitizens casting ballots are extremely rare. The president faced another defeat in the Supreme Court less than two months ago, when it rejected his attempt to limit mail balloting through changes at the Postal Service. Voting rights groups, Democrats and the Justice Department have been exchanging a flurry of legal filings that reveal how Trump’s attempts to expand federal control over state-run election s — combined with high-stakes races — are resulting in court battles that could extend past Election Day into ballot counting and certification of the results. Trump also has ramped up his own equivocations about whether the election will be legitimate, as he has in the past. A week before Election Day , when a reporter asked him if he would accept the results, he offered a qualified answer.
Because a new voting system safety feature malfunctioned, officials said, at polling locations across Florida’s Broward County, voting was delayed for 20 minutes after polls opened. Because some of them may not be able to get to polling places, election administrators in the Navajo Nation announced changes to several of its polling locations, and in Utah’s rural San Juan County, voters were being allowed to vote electronically on Tuesday. The Department of Justice was making its largest-ever effort to monitor Election Day polling places across all 50 states, countered by an even larger effort among Democrats and allied groups, and at the president’s urging had sued to block certification of Alaska’s results if the outcome of the Senate race favored Democrats. The problem was solved by 7:20 a.m., and Scott encouraged those who left to return.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a warning on its X account Tuesday that pushed the administration’s narrative about noncitizen voting: “We will track you down, arrest you, and prosecute you,” the post read. Hannah Fried, co-founder and CEO of the voting rights group All Voting Is Local, said the limited issues she was seeing so far at polling places were “garden-variety stuff that any of us who works on election s is used to seeing, and it’s quickly resolved. In Westchester County, election officials said ballot scanners were not accepting paper ballots, an issue that resulted from a program update made after polling equipment was initially prepared and tested. One resident, registered Democrat Benjamin Hort, said he opted not to cast a provisional ballot Tuesday and plans to come back later in the day , when he hoped the machine s would be operational. “I’ll wait as long as I have to,” Hort said. Supervisor of Election s Joe Scott apologized to voters who had to wait, and said some left before they were able to vote. Amy Keith, the Florida state director for Common Cause, said the flooding is a big issue. “Today it has already been a pretty challenging morning,” she said, urging voters to double check their voting locations with election supervisors. In another Monday night ruling, a federal judge said the Trump administration must stop sending voter lists of alleged noncitizens to election officials. Election law experts said Trump’s lawsuits go beyond historic norms, but that the administration’s legal arguments were unlikely to convince judges. “I will if they are honest,” he said.
