Voting in the United States largely took place without problems across the country on Tuesday (5), with only scattered reports of delays due to extreme weather, ballot printing errors, and technical issues.
A majority of the issues reported were “largely expected and planned routine events,” said Cait Conley, senior advisor to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, at a press conference. She stated that the agency was not tracking any significant national incidents that impacted election security.
In Pennsylvania, one of the swing states, initial reports that Republican election monitors were not allowed to enter some polling places were quickly resolved. A Pennsylvania state judge ordered that the polls remain open for two extra hours in Cambria County, which voted 68% for former President Donald Trump in 2020. The county sought the extension after a software malfunction affected the ballot scanning machines, although county officials confirmed that no one was turned away from the polls and stated that all ballots would be counted.
In Missouri, flooding made one polling location in the St. Louis area difficult to reach and cut power to another, requiring poll workers to resort to a generator to continue election operations. Still, in several rain-affected states, voters were enthusiastically huddled under umbrellas while waiting in line to vote.
In Maine, at least three high schools serving as polling places were subjected to false reports of shootings, but voting continued uninterrupted while police confirmed that the calls were fake. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said there were some bomb threats reported at polling places, but all were deemed unreliable and authorities were investigating.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press’s tracking of early voting nationwide showed that more than 82 million ballots had been cast — just over half the total number of votes in the presidential election four years earlier. This is partly driven by Republican voters, who were casting early ballots at a higher rate than in recent elections following a campaign by Trump and the Republican National Committee to counter the Democrats’ long-standing advantage in early voting.
Source: AP