Despite the fears, election day mostly goes as planned

While there were reports of delays, glitches and disinformation in some key swing states — Arizona in particular — that could loom larger as vote counting plays out, few of the major disruptions that had been feared came to pass on Election Day.

But far-right media figures and Republican politicians seized upon even the limited issues and typical problems that occurred to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the vote.

In Arizona, for example, officials in Maricopa County — a hive of false election fraud conspiracies in 2020 — announced that tabulator machines at roughly 20% of voting centres had malfunctioned but said that they were confident that all votes would be counted, albeit with delays.

Even though an election official in Maricopa described the problem as “a technical issue,” leading Republicans such as Kari Lake, the party’s candidate for governor, and former President Donald Trump to suggest that the malfunctioning machines were part of a plot to suppress conservative votes.

Trump also capitalized on a minor problem in Detroit, where troubles with electronic poll books caused some people who showed up to vote in person to be told that they had already voted by absentee ballot.

The Detroit city clerk’s office put in place procedures to ensure that all voters could cast a ballot and that each voter could cast only one ballot, voting protection groups said. But Trump, posting on Truth Social, his social media platform, suggested that the issue was far worse than it was.

Notwithstanding such exceptions, though, the majority of the troubles that emerged at the polls Tuesday were pedestrian and procedural in nature — a far cry from the anxieties that had swirled for weeks about armed activists intimidating voters at ballot drop boxes and poll monitors planning aggressive voter challenges.

David J. Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said Election Day had in fact gone remarkably well, with high turnout, manageable lines and few problems.

“That said, the disinformation network is kicking into high gear, with some candidates and even members of Congress spreading falsehoods seeking to amplify the ordinary glitches we’re seeing or spread lies about the ballot casting and counting process,” Becker said.

Votes in many states were still being counted after nightfall Tuesday, leaving the possibility that more severe disruptions could come to light or that other incidents could become flashpoints for the right.

Still, most of the reports of troubles at polls were relatively minor.

In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, some polling stations ran out of paper, forcing voters to use provisional ballots. In Cobb County, Georgia, a judge extended voting hours after determining that some polling stations were forced to open late. And some paper ballots in Kansas that were folded while being sent to polling stations became unreadable by vote-counting machines.

In one of the most significant developments on Election Day, officials in Philadelphia, responding to a lawsuit by Republicans, voted Tuesday morning to reinstate a time-consuming process meant to forestall double voting.

At a special meeting, the Philadelphia City Commissioners voted 2-1 to reinstate a process called “poll book reconciliation,” which is designed to eliminate the duplication of in-person votes and those already cast as mail-in or absentee ballots.

Seth Bluestein, one of the commissioners, said after the vote that the decision meant an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 paper ballots would not be counted on election night so that officials could make sure there was no double counting.

The commissioner’s decision will delay the final tally of votes in Philadelphia and affect one of the nation’s most hotly contested Senate elections, pitting the Democratic candidate, John Fetterman, against the Republican, Dr. Mehmet Oz, in what polls show is a very close race.

Officials in Maricopa County said that the problems with the ballot tabulation machines were largely related to valid ballots being rejected or to machines failing to read ballots successfully on the first try. About 60 of the county’s 223 voting centres had reported trouble with the machines.

Bill Gates, chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, both Republicans, said that the problems were disappointing but that voters could still cast ballots and that nobody was being denied a voice in the election.

“None of this indicates any fraud,” Gates said. “This is a technical issue.”

Nonetheless, several prominent right-wing figures claimed on social media that problems at voting sites would disproportionately affect Republicans, who have recently preferred voting in person because of a distrust of mail-in ballots.

Lake, who has frequently sown doubts about election integrity, reposted a video on her Twitter account showing a poll worker in Maricopa telling voters that one of the ballot tabulators was not working and that another was misreading about 25% of ballots.

“THIS is why we must reform our elections,” Lake wrote in a post accompanying the video.

Her lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, who also works with Trump, announced Tuesday night that she had filed a lawsuit against Richer and other Maricopa elections officials, claiming that several voters in the county had been “unlawfully induced by poll workers to discard their ballots or otherwise forfeit their opportunity to cast a legally sufficient vote.” The Republican National Committee also announced Tuesday night that it had filed suit seeking to extend voting hours in Maricopa County because of tabulation glitches, but a federal judge hearing the case denied the emergency request.

In the months leading up to the election, the Republican Party and allied groups trained tens of thousands of people around the country to serve as poll watchers and to look for what they believed to be irregularities at ballot counting centres. The monitors were told to take copious notes, which could be useful for potential court challenges, raising the prospect of a replay in state and local elections of Trump’s attempts to use the courts to overturn his loss two years ago.

While the large number of poll watchers caused concerns, there were only occasional reports of intimidation at the polls Tuesday.

In Milwaukee, election officials reminded a woman, who described herself as an observer and was taking photographs of people casting absentee ballots, that she was not allowed to engage directly with voters.

In Fulton County, Georgia, election officials said that two poll workers — a woman and her son — had been removed from their posts at a polling station place in suburban Johns Creek after officials were alerted to comments the woman made online that suggested she had taken part in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Nadine Williams, Fulton County’s interim director of elections, said that another poll worker in Johns Creek saw a social media post the woman had written and that county officials sent the information to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office for review.

“They looked at the social media post and said they agree with the concern, and it’s our decision to remove,” Williams said.

A federal judge in Texas issued an order Tuesday morning barring election workers from joining poll watchers in shadowing Black voters at a community centre in Beaumont.

The order by Judge Michael J. Truncale came in response to a lawsuit filed Monday by the NAACP claiming that white election workers at the community centre had repeatedly asked Black voters in “aggressive tones” to recite their addresses out loud within the earshot of other voters, even after they had already been checked in.

Suzanne Almeida, director of state operations for Common Cause, a government accountability watchdog group, said that while her organization had received numerous reports about people monitoring polling locations with cameras, in most of those situations, there was no direct intimidation of voters.

“I am happy to report that today has been relatively quiet on the political violence front,” she said.