CNN –
Americans headed to the polls Tuesday for an election that has state and local officials across the country on edge as they brace for potential problems at polling places, contentious legal battles over ballots and misinformation about voting itself
More than 45 million early ballots were cast in 47 states, and officials also expect high turnout on Election Day for congressional, state and gubernatorial contests that will determine control of Congress and state legislative chambers. .
The vast majority of the tens of millions who will vote on Tuesday will do so without a hitch, in an election where early voting has surged to 2018 levels. And the vast majority of voting problems will be decidedly minor and small-scale, such as long queues, bad weather or technological failures.
Voting rights advocates in key states said the first few hours of Tuesday’s midterm voting appeared to go smoothly, with only isolated problems reported.
“What we’re seeing are things that we typically see on election day,” said Susannah Goodman, director of election security for Common Cause. “Sometimes voters come in and one of the voting machines isn’t working, or the lines are a little longer.”
In Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest, officials said tabulators had problems at about 20 percent of their polling places. Maricopa County President Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer advised affected voters to place their ballots in a secure box attached to the tabulators and said they would be counted Tuesday evening.
Some registration machines at voting centers in Bell County, Texas, were not working Tuesday morning due to synchronization issues related to the weekend daylight saving time change. There have also been isolated incidents of electronic survey books in Detroit, Michigan, according to Jake Rolow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State.
At the same time, election officials are grappling with new pressures from the conspiratorial right. Led by former President Donald Trump, a growing number of Republican politicians have attacked the legitimacy of the vote and repeated false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and have planned similar attacks for this term.
State and local officials and voting rights advocates have raised the alarm that political attacks, including a marked increase in threats of violence against poll workers, have led to an exodus of local election officials in charge of voting.
Early voting has provided a preview of potential issues, both big and small, that could arise on Election Day. In Arizona, armed poll watchers were accused of conspiring to intimidate voters, and in Pennsylvania, a legal battle is underway over technical errors that invalidated mail-in ballots.
Legal efforts to challenge these issues have also expanded. In all, there have been about 120 voting-related legal cases filed through Nov. 3, compared with 68 before Election Day 2020. More than half of the cases have sought to restrict access to vote, according to Democracy Docket, a liberal liberal. -Inclined right to vote and media platform that monitors electoral litigation.
In Pennsylvania, some counties are asking voters to correct absentee ballots with missing or incorrect dates that the state Supreme Court ordered thrown out, pending a federal legal challenge. Meanwhile, in Michigan, a judge on Monday threw out a lawsuit by the GOP secretary of state’s nominee seeking to throw out absentee ballots in Democratic-heavy Detroit.
Georgia’s Cobb County on Monday extended the deadline to deliver approximately 1,000 absentee ballots to Nov. 14, after ballots were not mailed until just days before Election Day due to procedural errors at the electoral office.
Beyond the legal wrangling, election officials are anticipating potential conflicts with voter denialists who have harassed and threatened officials during the 2020 election and have prepared for aggressive monitoring of the upcoming midterm contest.
In North Carolina, approximately 15 incidents of alleged intimidation have been reported to the state Board of Elections since in-person early voting began.
The incidents included some people outside a county election board videotaping a poll worker’s license plate and a situation in which a poll worker was followed from the polling place to the election office and then the they continued to their neighborhood.
In Arizona, the secretary of state’s office has sent 18 referrals to law enforcement related to mailbox intimidation, including a threatening message to a government worker and several voters who report being filmed at locations of mailbox in Maricopa County last week. A federal judge earlier this month imposed new restrictions against a right-wing group in the state after complaints about aggressive polling station patrols in the state, including a ban on members openly carrying guns or wearing body armor.
In Beaumont, Texas, a federal judge barred poll workers at a polling place from engaging in conduct black voters said was intimidating.
U.S. District Judge Michael J. Truncale issued the temporary restraining order Monday in a case filed by the Beaumont chapter of the NAACP, which alleged that white poll workers spoke aggressively to black voters, stood too close to them while they voted and refused to help them cast their ballots. ballot papers
Federal officials have warned that domestic violent extremists pose a greater threat to the 2022 midterms.
As votes come in and begin to be processed and counted on Tuesday, election officials are on guard against conspiracy theories that often spread like wildfire but are completely false.
Because laws in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan prevent early processing of mail-in ballots, it could be several days before all votes are counted in those states. In Pennsylvania, where the Senate race could determine which party controls the chamber, a “red mirage” is expected as Election Day votes, expected to include more Republicans, are likely to be tabulated before ballots by mail, which is expected more Democrats. use.
The opposite could be true in Arizona, where mail-in ballots are processed as soon as they are received, meaning those ballots will be the first to be counted after the polls close.
This story has been updated with additional news.