WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — Polls opened across the eastern United States on Tuesday with few disruptions so far, even as President Donald Trump went on questioning whether the vote would be honest.
Voting so far has gone with relatively few problems, despite months of false claims from Trump about widespread fraud. Early voting is on course to pass the level of the last midterm elections.
The clearest problem on Tuesday morning was in Westchester County, a New York suburb with a competitive House race, where voting machines had trouble accepting paper ballots. Officials said ballots were going into emergency bags to be counted later, that they would stay secure and monitored, and that people could keep voting.
Heavy rain and flash floods in parts of Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico were expected to make it harder for some people to reach the polls. The Navajo Nation changed several of its polling locations, and voters in rural San Juan County, Utah, were allowed to vote electronically. Officials have also told people with late mail ballots to use drop boxes or deliver them by hand, because of concerns about postmark delays.
Asked last week if he would accept the results, Trump replied: “I will if they’re honest elections.”
Election officials and Democratic groups had prepared for immigration agents at voting sites or federal officers seizing machines. None of that had happened by the start of voting, and the administration has insisted that no armed federal officials will guard the polls. The Justice Department has sent a record number of monitors to polling places.
The administration has lost most of its pre-election fights in court. On Monday night the Supreme Court rejected its push to make California set aside thousands of ballots, and a federal judge ordered it to stop sending officials lists of alleged noncitizen voters. It did win one ruling that night, when a federal appeals court voted 2-1 to pause an order against its demands and prosecution threats aimed at state election officials.
Research and state investigations have repeatedly found that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. The first polls close at 4am on Wednesday, Pakistan time, and the last at 11am. Our live results card will update through the count.
