CNN
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Voting rights advocates in key US states said the first hours of voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections appeared to be going smoothly, with a few isolated problems reported, including in the key swing state of Arizona where some have tried to raise the idea of fraud despite assurances to the contrary from county officials.
The most serious issue was in a suburb of Milwaukee, where a 38-year-old man was arrested after threatening voters with a knife, briefly forcing one polling place to close.
The man demanded that staff “stop the voting,” the West Bend Police Department said in a statement. He was arrested without incident and no injuries were reported, police said.
In Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous, officials said tabulators had tech issues in about 20% of its voting locations. Maricopa County chairman Bill Gates and recorder Stephen Richer advised voters experiencing issues to put their ballots inside a secure box attached to the tabulators and assured they would be counted by bipartisan vote counters after polls close.
“There was no one who came today with a valid ID who was turned away from the polls,” Gates told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “Even when we had this [issue] and we hadn’t figured out the solution, people were still able to vote. It was just a matter of maybe not voting in the way they wanted to.”
The tabulator problems, however, were played up in right-wing media, including by Donald Trump Jr., after a post showed an election worker in the Phoenix suburb of Anthem explaining the problem to voters.
Election officials have particularly faced newfound pressures from the conspiratorial right. Led by former President Donald Trump, a growing number of Republican politicians have attacked the legitimacy of the vote and repeated false claims that the 2020 election was stolen – and previewed similar attacks for these midterms.
By the afternoon, county officials said they had discovered the tabulation issues were due to printer settings. The elections office said changing the printer settings has so far worked at 17 voting locations and technicians across the county are working to fix printer settings at the remaining locations.
“County technicians have changed the printer settings, which seems to have resolved this issue,” the county’s elections department said in a statement. The county said some of the printers were “not producing dark enough timing marks on the ballots.”
The tabulator issue is a representative example of the challenges that state and local officials face Tuesday as they brace for potential problems at voting places, contentious legal fights over ballots and disinformation about the vote itself.
State and local officials and voting rights advocates have raised the alarm that the political attacks, including a marked rise in threats of violence against election workers, have sparked an exodus of local elections officials in charge of the vote.
Despite these concerns, the vast majority of the tens of millions who cast ballots on Tuesday will do so without issue, in an election where early voting has been ahead of 2018 levels.
“What we are seeing are things that we usually see on Election Day,” said Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause. “Sometimes voters are going in and one of the voting machines isn’t working, or lines are a little longer.”
Cynthia Nogar, who voted for Democratic candidates in Rochester, Minnesota, told CNN her voting location at a local church was organized and went smoothly despite her own concerns.
“I couldn’t help but be a little concerned about what might happen … but it was just as quiet as usual,” she said. “That was really nice. It was kind of a relief, you know?”
The vast majority of voting issues have been decidedly minor and small scale, such as long lines, bad weather or tech glitches.
In Bell County, Texas, some check-in machines at voting centers were not working Tuesday morning due to synchronization issues tied to the switch from Daylight Saving Time over the weekend. Voting will now be open until 8 p.m.
There were also isolated incidents of e-poll books going down in Detroit, though the problems have since been addressed, according to Jake Rollow, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State.
A polling location in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, was moved to another location after a bomb threat was made Tuesday morning at Kenner Discovery School, according to tweets from Jefferson Parish, Kenner Police and the Secretary of State’s office.
The North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to allow three polling precincts to close an hour later in North Carolina after their opening was delayed.
In Pennsylvania, polls in Luzerne County will stay open until 10 p.m. Tuesday due to an earlier paper shortage, per an order from county judge Lesa S. Gelb.
In the order, Gelb wrote voters in the county were “disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote … through no fault of their own.”
Further, an extra verification process to ensure voters didn’t vote both by mail and in person could delay counting ballots and getting election results in Philadelphia, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia City Commissioners told CNN on Tuesday.
“We’re going to go as fast as we can go; I don’t think anybody knows yet,” when the count will be done, Kevin Feeley, a spokesperson for the Commissioners’ office told CNN.
In North Carolina, roughly 15 incidents of alleged intimidation have been reported to the state Board of Elections since the start of early in-person voting.
Incidents included some individuals outside of a county board of elections shooting video of an election worker’s license plate and one situation where an election worker was followed from the voting site to the elections office and then followed to their neighborhood.
In Arizona, the secretary of state’s office has sent 18 referrals to law enforcement related to drop-box intimidation, including a threatening message toward a government worker and several voters reporting being filmed at drop box locations in Maricopa County last week.
A federal judge earlier this month imposed new restrictions against a right-wing group in the state following complaints about aggressive patrols of ballot boxes in the state, including blocking the members from openly carrying guns or wearing body armor.
In Beaumont, Texas, a federal judge barred poll workers at an election site from engaging in conduct that Black voters said was intimidating.
US District Judge Michael J. Truncale issued the temporary restraining order Monday in a case brought by Beaumont’s chapter of the NAACP, which alleged that White poll workers spoke aggressively to Black voters, hovered too close behind them while voting and declined to help them cast their ballots.
Federal officials have warned that domestic violent extremists pose a heightened threat to the 2022 midterms.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
