Early Election Day hiccups added fuel to an inferno of distrust about the results and the possibility of a lengthy period of election legal challenges to follow.
Bomb threats cleared polling places in Democrat-friendly Fulton County, Georgia, for a brief period in the morning, while voting in Republican-leaning Cambria County, Pennsylvania, was disrupted by a software glitch that local officials said threatened to “disenfranchise a significant number of voters.”
“The malfunction caused voter confusion, long lines of voters, and many individuals left the polling locations without casting a ballot,” Ronald Repak, the county board’s lawyer, told a judge in asking that two hours be added to the voting period. The judge authorized polls in the county to stay open until 10 p.m.
But overall officials said things were going fairly smoothly by late afternoon.
“It’s not perfect this time,” David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights lawyer and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters Tuesday morning. But he added, “given the disinformation we are still seeing today, it’s going remarkably well.”
Former President Donald Trump, though, said he saw worrying signs.
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“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” he posted on social media, though he didn’t cite specifics and local officials said they weren’t aware of what he was referring to.
Mr. Trump later suggested similar issues in Detroit. Michigan and Pennsylvania are battleground states, along with Wisconsin.
Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said they had heard of problems in Milwaukee, claiming ballot counting was initially done wrong and officials had to start over.
The election is being held with voters already primed for hijinks and bungles, after the pandemic-infused 2020 election.
All sides — from political parties to election officials to the new media — were primed for the worst, following the weeks of challenges and unfounded claims of stolen votes four years ago that culminated in a violent mob storming the Capitol to disrupt the Electoral College vote count on Jan. 6, 2021.
This time around, police and National Guard troops were put on standby in some states to prepare for violent fallout.
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There were plenty of the usual types of snafus that plague every election. A polling place in Arizona opened late after an election worker forgot a key, The Associated Press reported, while malfunctions delayed some polling openings in Illinois and Kentucky. Severe weather caused a temporary power outage at a polling place in Missouri.
Bigger problems came from outside actors.
Officials in Georgia and at the federal level fingered Russian actors as the culprits behind the bomb threats against polling places in Fulton County.
“None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far,” the FBI said Tuesday.
That came a day after federal national security agencies issued a joint warning that “foreign adversaries,” and Russia in particular, were stepping up their attempts to undermine confidence in the election.
“Russia is the most active threat. Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences,” said the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
On Tuesday, the FBI said without pointing to a specific actor, that it had detected new false videos aimed at upending the vote.
One warned people to stay away from polling locations due to terrorist activities. The other included a fake FBI press release suggesting voting had been rigged in several key states.
Online, rumors of bias swirled Tuesday.
Some social media users complained that Google searches for Vice President Kamala Harris directed people to polls, while searches for former President Donald Trump did not. Google said it fixed the issue, which it blamed on the fact that Ms. Harris’ last name is also shared by some counties, which triggered a different type of search result.
Nearly 86 million votes were cast ahead of Election Day, including 47 million in-person early votes and 39 million mail ballots returned, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Some 28 million more mail ballots had been requested by voters but not returned by Tuesday morning, the lab reported.
Tens of millions more votes were being cast in person on Tuesday, and states were preparing to count them later in the day and, in some cases, warning the full count could take several days.
Democrats and Republicans have armies of lawyers waiting to pounce on irregularities.
The Republican National Committee, for example, joined in calls to extend voting hours in Cambria County in Pennsylvania after the delays and long lines there.
That follows a longer season of legal wrangling that saw Republican-led states battle the Justice Department over deleting noncitizens’ names from voting lists and the RNC fight states over increasingly permissive mail-ballot systems.
Mark Elias, a Democratic election lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket, said the 2024 race has already seen an “explosion of litigation.” He tracked nearly 200 lawsuits filed in 40 states.
“Equally important, however, has been the result of those cases. To be blunt, the GOP has learned that while it is easy to file a lawsuit, it is difficult to win one,” he said. “Their losses have been staggering. In the month of October alone, the Republican Party lost 20 lawsuits.”
Another loss came Tuesday after an Arizona judge declined the Maricopa County Republican Committee’s request to bar voting machines that didn’t meet state standards for password protections.
Meanwhile in Colorado, a judge on Tuesday rejected a request to order some counties to conduct hand counts of their ballots after voting machine passwords were inadvertently posted online.
The federal Justice Department deployed election teams across the country, sparking a striking backlash from some GOP-led states who said they didn’t want the federal government to interfere in how they ran elections.
Missouri and Texas each sought restraining orders to keep the monitors out of polling places. Judges were skeptical of both states’ requests, though Texas said it did have an agreement with federal monitors to stay out of the polling locations.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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