Midterm Election Vote Watch

Tracking Problems at the Polls

Election officials are on alert for voter intimidation. Problems with voting equipment in Arizona and Michigan have been seized on by the right. Our reporters are covering the issues from polling places around the country.

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Voters filled out their ballots at the Holiday Park Community Center in Albuquerque on Tuesday.Credit...Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

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Follow along for live updates, results and analysis from our reporters covering Election Day across America.

Voting machine problems in Arizona fuel right-wing fraud claims.

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Despite officials in Maricopa County assuring that problems with some ballot tabulation machines would not deny people the chance to vote, claims of voter fraud circulated on social media and in right-wing media.CreditCredit...Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

A series of technical glitches disrupted ballot counting on Tuesday at about one in four voting centers in Republican-led Maricopa County, Ariz., rekindling embers of baseless voter fraud claims in the right-wing media.

Officials in Maricopa, one of the nation’s most populous counties and a focus of efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, said the problem affected ballot tabulation machines in about 60 of the county’s 223 voting centers.

In the afternoon, the county said it had isolated the problem: printers were not making dark enough markings on the ballots, and that it was not a software problem.

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

Later Tuesday, a judge denied an emergency lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee and several Republican candidates seeking to extend voting hours in Maricopa. Republicans had argued that tabulation issues in more than 20 percent of the county’s voting centers had disenfranchised voters. The judge did not agree.

But claims of widespread voter fraud circulated quickly on social media and in right-wing media anyway, with several commentators and politicians arguing that problems at voting sites would disproportionately hurt Republicans, who have generally preferred voting in person because of distrust of mail-in ballots.

“Can this possibly be true when a vast majority of Republicans waited for today to Vote?” former President Donald J. Trump wrote on Truth Social about the issues in Arizona. “Here we go again? The people will not stand for it!!!”

The chair of the state Republican Party, Kelli Ward, immediately raised the possibility of “malfeasance” and talked of recalling officials.

About six in 10 Arizona voters reside in Maricopa County, which has tilted increasingly toward Democrats since 2016. Several Republican election deniers are running in competitive races in Tuesday’s election.

Reports of the problems set off a quick firestorm. The Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of online information researchers, found more than 40,000 messages on Twitter about the issue before noon on Tuesday, with a large spike in traffic after a video was shared by Charlie Kirk, a conservative radio host who later said that people “need to be arrested for what is happening in Maricopa County.”

The video showed a poll worker outside a polling station telling voters that two ballot tabulators were malfunctioning. The worker told voters that if their ballot is rejected, they can have the ballot read manually or in a tabulator later.

“No one’s trying to deceive anybody,” the poll worker says.

“No, not on Election Day. No, that would never happen,” the person recording the video replies in a sarcastic tone.

Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.

Voters in Republican area of Maricopa County see dark motives behind ballot problems.

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People waiting to vote at a polling location in Peoria, Ariz.Credit...Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

PHOENIX — Conspiratorial murmurs were moving faster than the line of mostly Republican voters that snaked around Desert Hills Community Church on Tuesday.

“I’m beginning to not even believe in our system in Arizona,” Darrell Cates, 56, a Republican, said as he waited to vote while election workers inside grappled with malfunctioning ballot-tabulation machines that had slowed voting.

“I believe it’s absolutely deliberate,” he added.

Republican officials in Maricopa County stressed on Tuesday that there was no fraud or foul play behind the problems with dozens of voting machines that had affected about 20 percent of the election sites across the county. They said that voters were still able to drop off their ballots in a secure box so they could be counted later.

But some Arizona Republican voters waiting in line rejected that explanation out of hand, echoing concerns of right-wing lawmakers and activists who raised doubts about the integrity of the election in a fiercely contested county.

Arizona is a swing state that has been at the center of Republican efforts to undo and discredit the last presidential election, and Republicans here went into Election Day with little faith in their state’s election system.

“This is a highly Republican stronghold and all these machines aren’t working,” said Cathy Schwanke, a Republican precinct captain. “The machines are just spitting out ballots.”

The machine malfunctions and long lines some of these voters saw at polling places in heavily Republican areas simply offered more fodder for distrust.

“When they screw up at this level, what else are they doing?” said John Parish, a pilot who said he cast his ballot into a secure box to be counted later after the machine refused to accept it. “We put it in forward, backward, and flipped it over.”

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In a rural Arizona outpost, deep suspicions cloud Election Day voting.

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An observer on Election Day sitting by the entrance to a polling location at a community center in Wickenburg, Ariz.Credit...Rebecca Noble for The New York Times

WICKENBURG, Ariz. — Concerns over Tuesday’s election vote count were running deep among conservative voters in the small, rural town of Wickenburg, in Republican-led Maricopa County, where some said they had experienced trouble this morning getting their ballots through two vote-counting machines.

“I am worried that my vote is not going to count,” said Roman Patrias, 73, a retired manufacturing worker, waving his arms out in exasperation. “I did it like 15 times — putting it in, turning it over, putting it in backwards.”

Mr. Patrias said election officials had taken his vote and put it in a locked box to be counted later. Republican officials in Maricopa County have stressed that there was no fraud or foul play and that those ballots will be counted later.

But those assurances were of no use for Mr. Patrias, who said he had waited until Election Day to vote because he had been so wary of voting by mail.

Arizona has been at the center of conspiracy theories about the 2020 stolen election, with top Republican candidates on the ballot fueling distrust in the state’s machinery as late as Monday night.

As Maricopa officials grappled with malfunctioning ballot tabulating machines earlier Tuesday, the reports had ignited a surge in claims of voter fraud across right-wing media and barricades were placed around the county’s election office in central Phoenix in case of possible protests. By mid-afternoon, Maricopa County officials said they had identified a printer problem to fix the tabulation issues at about 60 centers.

In Wickenburg, a deep red outpost of some 7,000 people northwest of Phoenix, lies that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump have continued to circulate since President Biden won Arizona by just 10,000 votes. It is a place with Old West-style downtown shops, dude ranches and a rehab facility that had been visited by the disgraced Hollywood personalities Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.

It is home to a bar that stirred national attention when it defied a stay-at-home order by the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, at the height of the Covid pandemic.

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An electioneer, Barbara Russell, 70, called the Arizona Republican Party office on Tuesday to report tabulation issues at the Wickenburg Community Center. Some voters said they had experienced trouble getting their ballots through two vote-counting machines.Credit...Rebecca Noble for The New York Times

Outside a polling site at the community center early Tuesday, Barbara Russell, 70, an online business owner working as an electioneer, was fielding voters’ complaints behind a small table with fliers for Republican candidates and the “2,000 Mules” documentary. The debunked film about election fraud was inspired by another small farming outpost a more than three-hour drive south.

Ms. Russell, who did not trust the results of the 2020 election, said many conservative voters this year had decided to vote in person because they no longer had confidence in the vote-by-mail process. She said she went into Election Day feeling better than last time as state lawmakers had implemented fixes to address some of her concerns, including new rules on the thickness of paper that can be used to print the ballots and on the types of pens that can be passed out. (According to one unsubstantiated theory, election officials had declared that ballots marked with Sharpie pens aren’t counted.)

“This is a problem,” Ms. Russell said of the latest ballot machine issues, saying she was praying for “a red tsunami wave” to override it.

By the early afternoon, the problems appeared to have been worked out in Wickenburg, and several people said the process had gone smoothly. But the technical difficulties aroused suspicions even among conservatives who did not believe the last presidential election had been stolen. Jennifer Stokes-Jacobs, a retiree, believed President Biden had been legitimately elected.

“This is the first time in a few years that I am really concerned about the turnout of the votes and what they are doing with the votes,” she said.

A correction was made on 
Nov. 8, 2022

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the rural Arizona town where voters experienced problems with vote-counting machines. It is Wickenburg, not Wickenberg.

A correction was made on 
Nov. 9, 2022

An earlier version of this article misstated President Biden’s margin of victory in Arizona in 2020. It was over 10,000 votes, not 12,000.

How we handle corrections

Trump, without evidence, asserts a software glitch in Detroit is evidence of widespread problems.

DETROIT — President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans who have advanced baseless conspiracy theories about Democrats stealing elections seized on a limited computer glitch in Detroit on Tuesday, suggesting it was evidence of fraud.

Some voters in Detroit arrived at the polls in the morning to find that, Because of what the city called “a harmless data error,” electronic poll books showed they had already been issued absentee ballots.

Poll workers informed them that they could still cast ballots at the polling sites and that their votes would be counted, according to election officials. The voters were also assured that the city clerk’s office has put procedures in place to ensure all voters can cast a ballot and each voter only casts one ballot.

City officials said the error was resolved by 9:30 a.m.

Nonetheless, Kristina Karamo, the Republican secretary of state candidate in Michigan, posted on her Twitter account a news report with a video of a polling place at Nolan Elementary-Middle School in Detroit where the issue cropped up. She claimed the problems were evidence of “fraud.”

Mr. Trump also weighed in on his Truth Social account, calling the “absentee ballot situation” in Detroit “really bad.”

“People are showing up to Vote only to be told, ‘sorry, you have already voted,’” Mr. Trump wrote, making errors in punctuation. “This is happening in large numbers, elsewhere as well. Protest, Protest, Protest.”

In an evening news conference, Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, who is running against Ms. Karamo, said the issue was the kind of “technical glitch” that arises and gets addressed immediately in well-run elections “and that’s precisely what we did today.”

“There are always things that can potentially be seized upon,” Ms. Benson said. “It’s a political strategy some have chosen to pursue. We all need to start seeing clearly what it is.”

Republicans, including Ms. Karamo, have organized in Michigan ahead of the election to raise possible evidence of fraud that could be used later to challenge results. Ms. Karamo was the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city of Detroit that could have disenfranchised 60,000 absentee voters in the city. A judge on Friday rejected the suit and said was full of baseless allegations.

Voter protection hotline monitors say they began to notice the glitch in the morning through calls and observations from monitors in polling places. The voters were still all given a way to vote, they said.

Kate Mason, an election protection coordinator with the nonprofit Michigan United, said she saw no sign of election tampering. “People try to make it into a big conspiracy thing but it’s not,” she said. “It’s just a computer glitch that caused the e-polling books to not work properly.”

Quentin Turner, of Common Cause Michigan, agreed: “There is no evidence any fraud occurred.”

Voting was largely smooth in Michigan, elections officials and monitors said.

At one polling place in Ann Arbor, a person serving as a poll challenger repeatedly tried to file invalid challenges against voters for a while, while in a polling place in Detroit another individual told some voters they looked ineligible to vote, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

These situations were isolated and resolved, the office said. In Dearborn some poll monitors and a poll worker said that a Republican poll challenger went to a few polling locations and asked numerous questions of poll workers that were disruptive. Some of the questions were based on misconceptions about voting machines.

At a counting center in downtown Detroit that became the center of turmoil two years ago, the count was going on without problems through the closure of polls.

Detroit’s Department of Elections said in a statement that when the polls opened, election inspectors in some precincts had received messages on the electronic poll-book screen saying that the ballot number had already been issued to an absentee ballot voter.

“This message does not mean that the voter who was issued an absent voter ballot was attempting to vote,” the statement said.

The problem stemmed from the fact that some precinct voters were given numbers identical to those used for ballots sent to absent voters, the city elections department said. The system flagged the duplicate ballot numbers and issued the error message. “In all circumstances eligible voters were able to vote,” the city said.

The city elections officials said the problem was fixed by adding a letter to the precinct ballot numbers to distinguish them from the absent voter ballots.

There was no risk of duplicate ballots, the city said, because safeguards preventing a voter from voting on more than one ballot were still in place.

At Nolan Elementary-Middle School, the scene of the report that Ms. Karamo posted on Twitter, voting was running smoothly during a visit in the afternoon. The neighborhood is overwhelmingly Black and Democratic.

“There were no issues at all,” said Cecil Weems, 44, as he was walking out of the gymnasium after voting.

Ryan Hooper contributed reporting.

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Poll workers in suburban Atlanta were removed after being linked to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

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Protesters outside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

ATLANTA — Two elections workers, a woman and her son, were removed from their posts at a polling place in suburban Johns Creek, Ga., on Tuesday morning after officials discovered that the woman was linked to the storming of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials from Fulton County and the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia secretary of state, shared with The New York Times a social media post from a woman named Laura Daube Kronen that he said was sent to his office by Fulton County officials. The post shows what appear to be photos of the woman at the Capitol building that day.

“I stood up for what’s right today in Washington, D.C.,” the post stated. “This election was a sham. Mike Pence is a traitor. I was tear gassed FOUR times. I have pepper spray in my throat. I stormed the Capitol Building. And my children have had the best learning experience of their lives.”

Jessica A. Corbitt-Dominguez, a Fulton County spokeswoman, said in a statement that a decision had been made to “terminate” the two workers.

“This decision is in alignment with our commitment to elections integrity,” she said. In an interview, Ms. Corbitt-Dominguez said that the county also learned about a social media post in which the woman “seemed to imply” that she was going to videotape elements of her work at the polling place, which is forbidden.

At a Tuesday morning news conference, Nadine Williams, Fulton County’s interim elections director, said the incident came to her department’s attention after another Johns Creek poll worker became concerned about a comment a fellow worker had made as well as some of the worker’s online posts. Ms. Williams did not elaborate on the nature of the comment or the posts.

Ms. Williams said county officials sent the information to the 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. So we decided, out of the safety for the election, we decided to remove them until we can complete the investigation.”

Ms. Williams said the woman and her son were removed from their posts before polls opened at 7 a.m. E.S.T.

Anger and regret as votes are rejected because of missing data in Pennsylvania.

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Election workers processing mail-in ballots in Philadelphia.Credit...Matt Rourke/Associated Press

Howard Schwartz filled out his mail-in ballot more than two weeks before Election Day, dropped it in a drop-box near his home in northeast Philadelphia, and found out just the day before the polls opened that his vote had been rejected.

Mr. Schwartz is among more than 2,000 people whose votes were invalidated because the ballots were undated, unsigned, incorrectly dated or were not placed in the required outer envelope, according to figures on the commission’s website as of Nov. 5.

The Philadelphia City Commission, the city agency that runs elections, invalidated the ballots after a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on a lawsuit by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania and others that ordered county election officials to “refrain from counting” ballots that were undated or contained dates outside a specified range.

Since saying on Saturday that it was “extremely disappointed” by the court’s order, the commission posted lists of voters in each category of rejected ballots on its website, and advised them to recast their vote in replacement ballots before the polls closed on Tuesday evening.

Mr. Schwartz said he received a phone call from the commission on Monday to tell him that his ballot was invalidated because it contained an incorrect date.

On Tuesday afternoon, he said he hoped to obtain a new ballot and hand it in to election officials at his polling station before it closed at 8 p.m., but he wasn’t sure he could because he was caring for his mother at a hospital some 45 minutes away from the polling place.

Mr. Schwartz, 68, a retired car salesman, said he had always voted in person in past elections but did so by mail this time because he needed to care for his mother, and is now baffled and angered that his vote may not count.

He thought he followed all the instructions for signing and dating his ballot, and has now been told that he didn’t meet the requirements.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “How could you physically put the wrong date on?” He said he would feel “left out” if he is unable to complete a replacement ballot in time.

In some other areas of Pennsylvania, some voters were seeking replacement ballots after theirs were rejected by election officials.

In western Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, the state’s second most populous county after Philadelphia, published a list on Sunday of around 1,000 voters with undated or improperly dated ballots. By Monday evening around 100 had come to the county elections bureau to fix their ballots.

Some Pennsylvania counties, however, were not letting voters know that their ballots were faulty, and according to several voting rights groups, some counties were not allowing voters who did have concerns about their mail-in votes to cast provisional ballots.

On Monday, the campaign of John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, along with several national Democratic campaign organizations, sued in federal court to have the invalidated votes counted, arguing that disqualifying a ballot because of a wrong date “serves no purpose other than to erect barriers to qualified voters exercising their fundamental constitutional right to vote.”

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.

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Voters in one mostly Hispanic polling site in Houston are unable to cast ballots for 4 hours.

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Voters waiting in line at the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center in Houston.Credit...Annie Mulligan for The New York Times

HOUSTON — Voters at a large polling place in a predominantly Hispanic area of Houston were unable to cast ballots for roughly four hours on Tuesday, raising concerns that many who had arrived before work to vote would not return.

The problems at the site, east of downtown, began before the polls opened: an election clerk quit and the voting machines were not set up, county election officials said. The county was considering extending hours at the polling site and at a handful of others that opened late, said Leah Shah, a spokeswoman for the Harris County Elections Administrator’s Office.

Later Tuesday, a judge ordered all polling places in Harris County to stay open an extra hour, after at least 12 locations did not open when required in the morning.

But the votes cast during that extra hour may not count: State officials asked the Texas Supreme Court to intervene and stay the order, and the court did so. Any provisional ballots cast after 7 p.m. will be set aside, according to the county elections administrator.

David Aguilar, 70, a retired musician, said he had arrived at the polling place before 6 a.m., anticipating long lines. But the doors did not open as planned at 7 a.m.

“They had the doors locked,” he said, describing a scene of confusion and mounting anger among voters who were turned away. “They were mad,” he said. “A lot were Latinas worried about disenfranchisement.”

Adrian Garcia, a Democratic county commissioner, who is running for re-election, was outside the polling place as voting resumed. “To have it be disrupted could discourage some people from voting,” Mr. Garcia said.

Mr. Aguilar, who said he eventually voted for Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic challenger to Gov. Greg Abbott, ended up waiting until 11 a.m. to cast his ballot and said he was among the first to do so. “I’m concerned about democracy,” he said.

Before the problems were resolved, voters were sent to surrounding polling places as lines grew. Across Houston, voters experienced long waits on Tuesday morning, in some cases more than 90 minutes.

Florida’s secretary of state is blocking federal monitors from entering polling sites.

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Residents line up to vote in downtown St. Petersburg, Fla.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

MIAMI — Florida’s Republican secretary of state has rejected a request from the Justice Department to place federal monitors inside polling sites in three of the state’s most populous counties, a move federal officials say could erode protections for minority and disabled voters.

On Monday, the Republican secretary of state in Missouri blocked a similar request to deploy monitors inside sites in Cole County, which includes the state capital, Jefferson City, over concerns some locations did not provide adequate access under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Justice Department is monitoring polling sites at 64 localities in 24 states to guard against violations of federal voting rights laws on Election Day. That is an increase of six states over the 2020 election, when the department dispatched monitors to polling stations in 44 cities and counties with documented histories of violations.

No federal monitors were stationed inside polling stations in 2020: The department, then run by Trump administration appointees, decided that the risk posed by the Covid-19 pandemic endangered voters and lawyers. Instead, they positioned monitors outside.

On Tuesday, Cord Byrd, the Florida secretary of state, told reporters the state had decided not to renew “consent” agreements that would have allowed the monitors to be inside polling sites in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, even though they had been allowed at those sites before the pandemic.

They were welcome to monitor conditions from outside as they did in 2020, he said.

“We wanted to make it clear that those are places for election workers and for voters,” Mr. Byrd said at a news conference. He added that he was seeking to bring the practice into compliance with state law, which prohibits most outsiders from being inside polling sites.

Mr. Byrd insisted that allowing federal monitors to be outside polling stations but not inside was not a change in policy. Neither, he said, was it motivated by politics. “This is not to be confrontational in any way,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the civil rights division of the Justice Department, which oversees the deployment of attorneys at polling sites, declined to comment.

Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that monitors pose no threat to voters, and that their placement typically has not been a matter of controversy.

Local officials have in many cases accepted federal oversight as a stabilizing factor, after the chaotic 2000 elections exposed serious flaws in the state’s election system.

The department had been able to mandate the placement of observers in states with chronic voting rights violations before the Supreme Court blocked that practice in 2013.

In Missouri, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican and the son of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, said in an interview that the department only informed Cole County officials of its intention to monitor balloting inside poll locations last Thursday.

“They sandbagged us,” he said. “They intentionally didn’t give us time to think about it or to react.”

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After a grueling election, officials brace for the aftermath.

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Voters in Jenkintown, Pa. Ballot issues are adding to the election-year static in a key swing state with one of the nation’s tightest Senate races.Credit...Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Pulling off a successful election amid partisan rancor, rampant misinformation and widespread doubts about the electoral system has been hard.

What comes next could be harder.

This is the first election in which a substantial number of candidates for major offices are election deniers or conspiracy theorists. Whether and how such candidates and their supporters will accept their losses if they lose is a major unknown.

This is also the first election in which an army of private poll watchers — largely recruited by groups wedded to the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen — is expected to try to gather evidence of fraud for later use in court battles and as fuel for protests.

This could be an election in which the outcomes of many close races would probably remain unknown for an extended time, should an expected cascade of lawsuits, recounts and other obstacles snarl the counting process. Whether delays will fuel the already poisonous mix of rumors and outright lies about the vote remains to be seen.

And this is the first election after the attack on the U.S. Capitol brought the gravity of the nation’s political and cultural divides into sharp relief — and for many voters ratcheted up the stakes of Tuesday’s vote and the ones to follow.

Nate Persily, an expert on election procedures and law at Stanford University, said the election’s aftermath would depend on how close the races were and what signals were sent out by powerful voices like former President Donald J. Trump, Fox News and defeated candidates.

“If Republicans do extremely well on Tuesday, I think there’s going to be less aggressive fighting in the post-election period,” he said. “If it’s close — and especially if the Senate is hanging in the balance — we could see a serious conflict.”

Legal conflicts over the counting of absentee ballots seem certain to erupt in states with close races, especially Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Courts in Wisconsin have failed to settle disputes over whether applications for mail ballots must be thrown out if voters’ addresses are incomplete but still decipherable.

In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court has ordered local election officials to sequester ballots with missing or erroneous dates and not to count them in Tuesday’s vote. But the court deadlocked on whether federal voting law required such ballots to be counted, and Democrats have sued on that question.

Election rules going to court have become the norm in recent years, of course. But their potential to delay or muddy the outcomes of close races could add a new measure of volatility to the tally.

Delays and countercharges in ballot fights open space for rumors, hyper-political spin and outright disinformation to breed and spread, said David J. Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“It’s all about the outcome and creating this opening for delegitimizing the process when you lose,” Mr. Becker said. “The problem with this is it also incites anger and potentially violence.”

Georgia’s vote goes mostly smoothly, despite a history of long lines and protests.

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Voters in Cobb County on Tuesday. In Georgia on Monday, a deadline for more than 1,000 absentee ballots in suburban Cobb County was extended to Nov. 14 after bureaucratic mistakes resulted in the ballots not being mailed in a timely manner.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

ATLANTA — Voting in Georgia, a state with a recent history of armed right-wing protesters popping up around election time and long lines at polling places, was going well by mid-afternoon, with few major kinks and no major acts of intimidation, state officials said.

“Smooth, smooth sailing,” said Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, in a phone interview at around 3 p.m. E.S.T.

Georgia is being closely watched for a number of reasons, including a notorious June 2020 primary election meltdown, much of it related to the implementation of new voting machines, which caused some voters to wait in line for hours. More recently, Georgia was hit with a wave of citizen challenges of voter registrations, many of which were filed by conservative activists who believe conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election being rife with fraud.

In the run-up to Election Day, the Brennan Center reported that groups and individuals had challenged about 65,000 voter registrations in Georgia.

But on Tuesday, Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, noted that all but 2,670 of them had been dismissed by local county elections boards. He said that those 2,670 voters could still vote with provisional ballots and would be given until the end of the day Monday to cure the challenge.

Long lines appeared to be another issue that had been fixed. Mr. Hassinger said that the average afternoon wait time at the Georgia polls was about two minutes.

“So far voting across Georgia has been spectacularly boring,” wrote Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office, in a morning Twitter post. “Fingers crossed it stays that way.”

There were a few issues. In Cobb County, a vote-rich suburban stretch of metro Atlanta, a judge on Tuesday ordered two polling places that had opened late to remain open longer than their planned 7 p.m. closing time. Cobb had been the site of drama Monday, when a deadline for more than 1,000 absentee ballots was extended to Nov. 14 after bureaucratic mistakes resulted in the ballots not being mailed in a timely manner.

In Fulton County, two elections workers, a woman and her son, were removed from their posts at a polling place in suburban Johns Creek, Ga., after officials discovered that the woman was linked to the storming of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials from Fulton County and the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

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Philadelphia says it will delay counting thousands of paper ballots.

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Voters wait in line before the Kendrick Recreation Center polling location in Philadelphia on Tuesday.Credit...Mark Makela/Getty Images

The Philadelphia agency that oversees elections said it will delay counting thousands of paper ballots after the polls close Tuesday night because of a lawsuit that accused it of being open to double counting.

The Philadelphia City Commissioners voted 2-1 at a special early morning meeting 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.

The decision will delay in the vote count in one of the nation’s most hotly contested battleground states, where the Democratic candidate, John Fetterman, and the Republican, Mehmet Oz, are in what polls show is a very close Senate race.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed on Oct. 27 by a conservative legal advocacy group, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, that was created in July by prominent Republicans, including former attorney general William P. Barr and Karl Rove, the political strategist and former aide to President George W. Bush.

The suit challenged the election board’s decision to forego the reconciliation process, which the commissioners had said was no longer needed because other measures to detect duplicate ballots were in place. Officials said the reconciliation had not found any duplicate votes in the last three elections.

But the lawsuit argued that the process had caught 40 double votes in the 2020 presidential election, and that the increase in mail balloting in recent years made it more necessary, not less.

A Pennsylvania Common Pleas Court had ruled on Monday that the elections board did not have to reinstate the reconciliation process, saying it was too close to Election Day to make such a major change. But the judge, Anne Marie Coyle, sharply criticized the board’s decision, saying the commissioners’ decision had “failed to consider the harm to public perception of our electoral process” that their decision to abandon the process could cause.

Seth Bluestein, one of the three commissioners, said after the vote that the decision will mean that an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 paper ballots will not be counted on election night so that officials can make sure there is no double counting.

He said that Philadelphia was the only county in Pennsylvania to be targeted by the lawsuit.

“Ballots that we received after the latest updates to the poll books will not get counted tonight while we reconcile the in-person vote with those returned ballots to make sure there are no double votes of somebody voting by mail,” he said.

Mr. Bluestein said no other county in Pennsylvania conducts poll book reconciliation because there has been no double voting for the last three elections.

“The procedure, which delays counting some ballots, is no longer necessary as poll workers and voters have gotten used to voting by mail,” he said.

— Jon Hurdle and Michael Wines

An inside look at the Ohio team pushing back on election fraud claims.

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Aides to the Ohio secretary of state are helping oversee a group dedicated to spotting false election claims before they go viral online.Credit...Nick Fancher for The New York Times

In Ohio, the secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has set up a team to spot and quash falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the election before they go viral online.

His effort is one of several misinformation rapid response teams run by state and local elections officials across the nation, underscoring how problematic online disinformation has become to the security of elections.

By midday on Tuesday, the team of five officials for the Ohio team had found dozens of examples of misinformation on Twitter about polling locations and rigged voting machines. The team had replied directly on Twitter to those spreading falsehoods to debunk the claims with accurate information. None of the posts had spread widely.

The team began its day at 6:30 a.m., when the polls opened in the state, operating from the 17th floor of an office building in downtown Columbus. The members are seated at computer terminals set up outside a conference room where lawyers and security officials for Mr. LaRose were monitoring local polling stations and communicating with local and federal security officials. They are overseen by Jon Keeling and Ben Kindel, two communications aides for Mr. LaRose.

When those monitoring the online claims catch a problem, they fill out a Google form describing the problematic post and the level of urgency. The submissions are compiled in a spreadsheet and color-coded based on their urgency. The spreadsheet appears on a large TV screen off to the side.

Around 8:30 a.m., the group found a tweet by an Ohio resident frustrated with the change in polling locations in her county. She said the change was made on Monday, an incorrect statement that the officials feared could stoke confusion and feed conspiracy theories. The new locations had been announced two months ago, the rapid response team replied to the resident on Twitter through an account for the secretary of state.

Later in the morning, a Twitter user falsely claimed that a poll worker from Cincinnati had tampered with 4,300 ballots from early voting. The rapid response team looked up the user and found that the tweet came from a comedian, and that an image of a burning truck purportedly containing ballots that was attached to the false post came from an article in March 2019. The team replied to the post: “WARNING: Don’t fall for this satirical (and very unfunny) tweet.”

The Ohio elections have drawn national attention for the heated Senate race between Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, and J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate and “Hillbilly Elegy” author who is supported by former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. LaRose said he had created the command center to try to conquer misinformation at its source.

“That’s often the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “We’re going to find out about something on social media long before we find out about it through some other channel.”

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Texas Judge orders poll workers not to discriminate against Black voters after lawsuit.

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Early voting in the midterm elections in El Paso in October. In Beaumont, in East Texas, a local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. has filed a lawsuit accusing poll workers of voter intimidation and discrimination.Credit...Paul Ratje/Reuters

A federal judge in Texas ordered poll workers not to discriminate against voters on Tuesday after the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Beaumont, Texas, brought a suit alleging that Republican-appointed poll workers intimidated and discriminated against Black voters during early voting.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Jessica Daye, a registered voter in Jefferson County, which includes Beaumont. It says that the voter was deterred from casting a ballot at a polling site and that, throughout the early-voting period, white poll workers made unwarranted requests of Black voters, followed them closely and did not provide the same assistance with new equipment that they gave to white voters.

“White poll workers throughout early voting repeatedly asked in aggressive tones only Black voters and not white voters to recite, out loud within the earshot of other voters, poll workers, and poll watchers, their addresses, even when the voter was already checked in by a poll worker,” Ms. Daye’s lawyers wrote in the suit.

The judge, Michael J. Truncale, ordered an immediate halt to the harassment in a temporary restraining order issued late Monday, but he limited his ruling to the polling site at issue, the John Paul Davis Community Center in Beaumont.

“We won the case,” said Rev. Michael Cooper, the president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., adding that they would be watching to ensure compliance on Election Day. “If there’s anything, we have our lawyers on standby.”

The lawsuit argued that the poll workers “intentionally treated Black voters differently than white voters,” violating the 14th and 15th Amendments, which prevent the denial of a citizen’s vote based on race, as well as the federal Voting Rights Act, outlawing discriminatory voting practices.

Ms. Daye left her polling center without voting after witnessing the treatment of Black voters, the suit said. She feared, among other things, she would also be asked to recite her address in front of the crowd.

The population of the city of Beaumont is 45 percent Black and 43.5 percent white, according to the 2020 census. The community center named in the suit is a voting location that serves a predominantly Black population that often skews Democratic, in a county that has had competitive local elections in recent years.

“We see this as a win for voting rights,” Anna Kathryn Barry, an assistant general counsel at the N.A.A.C.P., said of the judge’s decision. “The most important part of this order is that any and all polls workers, including the presiding judge, must stop the conduct that was intimidating voters.”

Threats to American democracy are a key factor in the midterms. Here are highlights of our coverage.

The 2022 election has, to a degree that is exceptional in modern American democracy, become a referendum on that democracy itself.

Democrats have tried — and struggled — to convince voters that the integrity of the election system is on the ballot, with Republicans who falsely claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen now running for office across the country, in some cases seeking positions that would give them oversight over future elections.

At the same time, Republican candidates and outside groups on the right have fomented distrust in the election system, prompting a wave of local activism targeting the machinery of that system and setting the stage for legal challenges after Election Day.

A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted last month found an electorate at once ambivalent and in conflict over the issue. Seventy-one percent of voters said democracy was at risk, and a majority in each party described the opposing party as a “major threat” to democracy — but only 7 percent of respondents said that threat was the most important problem the country faces.

Here are highlights of The Times’s coverage of the issue.

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North Carolina extends hours at three polling places where voting was delayed.

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People wait in line to vote at a polling place in Fuquay-Varina, N.C., on Tuesday. The state extended the hours of three polling places elsewhere in the state after they opened late.Credit...Allison Joyce/Getty Images

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections extended the hours of three polling places that had not been able to open on time on Tuesday, hoping that the additional time would allow voters who left the polling sites without voting to return and cast ballots in the evening.

Voting will be allowed at each polling site for an additional hour, the board said. Across the state, voters are electing a new senator and are also voting in a slew of House races.

Damon Circosta, the chairman of the elections board, said it was inevitable that at least a handful of polling places would have some hiccups in opening on Election Day.

“With over 2,600 polling places, invariably there’s going to be an inability to connect to a printer in one place or the losing of an access code to a building in another,” Mr. Circosta, a Democrat, said in an interview shortly before the board’s meeting.

Still, even minor irregularities have taken on an outsized importance during this year’s election in light of false claims of fraud in the 2020 elections.

In all, the delayed opening of the three polling places forced about 30 voters to leave before being able to cast their votes. The problems that led to delays were relatively mundane.

In Robeson County, just off of Interstate 95 near the South Carolina border, election officials were locked out of a volunteer fire department that was serving as a polling place, delaying voting by about an hour. In Wilson County, about an hour east of Raleigh, election officials had difficulty setting up their computers in one polling place, leading to a delay of about two hours. And at an event center turned polling place in Columbus County, northwest of Wilmington, problems with printing out voter authorization forms led to a delay of just over an hour.

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