Americans navigated a fraught voting landscape on Election Day as a largely smooth voting process early in the day was buffeted by bomb threats, widespread disinformation and unabated anxiety over the election outcome and aftermath.
Election officials across the country remained on guard in case problems arose at night, including once polls closed and the vote counting process began.
The vast majority of Americans were able to cast their votes unimpeded. But bomb threats called into precincts across four states caused multiple polling locations to temporarily close. Among the areas affected were two key counties in Georgia, DeKalb and Fulton, which includes Atlanta (a judge later ordered the Fulton sites to extend voting hours).
In DeKalb County, the threats led to evacuations during the final hour of voting. The secretary of state in Georgia said the threats had come from Russia.
Election officials described the election process as generally smooth, safe and secure; long lines were present but not widespread, and most glitches caused by machines or human error were swiftly addressed.
Former President Donald J. Trump tried to create a sense of widespread chaos in key cities, making claims of fraud in Detroit and Philadelphia without offering evidence. The Philadelphia district attorney said there was “no factual basis whatsoever” to Mr. Trump’s claims.
The former president’s Election Day messages about “cheating,” which came on Tuesday afternoon on his Truth Social website, contributed to what threatened to become an edgy new normal for the American voting system.
Voters in key counties in battleground states were already having to navigate bulletproof glass and security fences at polling locations. Some sites also saw the appearance of conservative activists hunting for examples of rare fraud.
For instance, in Philadelphia, partisan polling observers sought to copy down serial numbers from the backs of voting machines at a Southwest Philadelphia precinct, leading to those people’s temporary expulsion.
The observers appeared to be keying off a persistent false narrative from 2020 about how voting machines had stolen votes from Mr. Trump.
After four years of such story lines, some Trump supporters have been primed to see fraud in the normal process of administering elections. And the day brought a stream of false allegations on social media that inflated inevitable Election Day glitches into something more nefarious that could feed efforts to challenge a losing result in the days ahead.
In Cambria County, Pa., a rural red county east of Pittsburgh, machines were unable to scan voters’ ballots in the morning. The issue was eventually resolved, and a court ordered polling locations throughout the county to remain open two extra hours, until 10 p.m. tonight.
But Trump supporters on Elon Musk’s social network, X, suggested the problems were part of a plot to disenfranchise voters in a county that heavily favored Mr. Trump four years ago.
Officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency rebutted reports of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. “We have no data or reporting to support these claims,” Cait Conley, a senior official, said.
In Milwaukee, election officials sought to head off another potential source of disinformation, after discovering that 13 tabulators had the doors covering their power switches and data ports unlocked. Officials said that they would have to retabulate 31,000 votes.
Lara Trump, the co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, described it as “an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration” in a critical state, but city officials said it was relatively minor.
“The greatest harm you could have done would be to reset the machine,” said Jeff Fleming, a city spokesman, explaining that the additional step could add an hour or 90 minutes to the night’s count. “The corrective action has much more to do with providing a level of confidence with the results than anything else.”
The very present threat that Mr. Trump would try to overturn the results again added to the anxiety being expressed by voters at polling locations throughout swing states, many now equipped with panic buttons and police officers stationed outside.
Eleanor Boyle, 77, from Warminster Township in Bucks County, Pa., said that while she had faith in Pennsylvania and national elections, the voting had left her anxious and unsettled. She fears Trump supporters will not accept a loss; she watched the Jan. 6 chaos at the Capitol in horror.
“I’m very worried that there could be violence throughout the whole country, not just the Capitol,” Ms. Boyle, who goes by Bunny, said. When she mentioned to her sewing group that she planned to volunteer at the polls, “people asked if I was afraid — even here, in Warminster.”
Officials said they were prepared. As District Attorney Larry Krasner of Philadelphia put it while warning those who might make trouble at polling stations, “F around and find out.”
Late on Tuesday, election officials in Washington Township, near Pittsburgh, moved swiftly to head off a local plan to conduct an hand audit, which was not permitted under state law, by winning an emergency court order blocking it.
But there was also a level of hypervigilance that led to accusations of voter intimidation that did not pan out. For instance, a report that conservative activists had “intimidated” voters outside a polling station in Lee County, N.C., amounted to an overheard, harsh comment directed at a Latino voting rights group at the same polling station.
Dana Nessel, the Democratic attorney general of Michigan, said that voting had gone largely smoothly in her state on Tuesday, as was to be expected; she recalled that Election Day in Michigan in 2020 was largely calm, and it was not until the counting process began that disputes broke out. This year, she said, poll workers, election officials and law enforcement are ready for it.
“The important thing for me to let people know is that there’s going to be accountability.”
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