By Catalina Clarke
Election Day Poll Watch — early afternoon update. Catalina Clarke is Editor-in-Chief of The Library Media. This desk is monitoring polling-place conditions across the country today and will update through the close of polls.
What has changed since the midday edition. The closing map has begun to move. Election officials in North Carolina and a court in Pennsylvania have extended voting hours at a small number of precincts where voting was disrupted or delayed earlier today — the first poll-hour extensions of the day in the record this desk is following. In Ohio, the afternoon record has also narrowed the Toledo story: officials now put a precise length on the one polling-place closure, and a national election-security update confirms that none of the other schools that received threats was a voting site. Everything else on the standing list still holds at the latest sweep, at 2:51 PM Pacific: no ICE agents, armed federal agents, or troops at polling places, and no new threat reports beyond the Toledo cluster.
North Carolina: five precincts stay open later. The North Carolina State Board of Elections voted Tuesday to extend voting at five precincts in four counties, due to stoppages in voting during the day, the board announced. North Carolina polls normally close at 7:30 PM Eastern. The extensions are: the South Williams–Tabor City Courthouse precinct in Columbus County, open until 8:15 PM; the Murfreesboro 1–Murfee Center precinct in Hertford County and the K8 Holloway Recreation Center precinct in Lenoir County, open until 8:00 PM; the Como Fire and Rescue Building precinct in Hertford County, open until 7:55 PM; and the Wilson City Recreation Building precinct in Wilson County, open until 7:45 PM. Under state law, the board may extend hours only at sites where voting was interrupted for at least 15 minutes, and only for as long as the disruption; anyone arriving at an extended site after 7:30 PM votes provisionally. Because results cannot be released while voting continues, the board will not publish any unofficial statewide results until all polls are closed, and expects the first results at around 8:15 PM Eastern.
Pennsylvania: a court extends three Chester County precincts. In Chester County, Pennsylvania, the Court of Common Pleas has granted a 30-minute extension at three precincts — 201, 210, and 244, voting at Easttown Library, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, and Goshen Baptist Church — where delays in setting up voting machines briefly held up voting in the morning, according to the USA TODAY Network’s Pennsylvania live coverage at 12:27 PM Eastern, citing county election officials. Those three sites will close at 8:30 PM Eastern instead of Pennsylvania’s normal 8:00 PM; votes cast there after 8:00 PM will be provisional ballots. All other Chester County precincts close at 8:00 PM as scheduled, and the ballot drop box at Easttown Library also closes at 8:00 PM. No extension has been reported for Westchester County, New York, where scanners failed this morning: County Executive Ken Jenkins said late this morning that the Board of Elections there has not indicated a need to extend poll hours.
Toledo: the closure, measured. The afternoon sweeps have put firm edges on this morning’s bomb threats. Beverly Elementary School in Toledo — the one polling location in the cluster — was closed for one hour and fifteen minutes, according to Lucas County Board of Elections Deputy Director Tim Monaco, reported by USA TODAY. Two threats were called in at about 10:30 AM Eastern; a K-9 sweep found nothing, police cleared the site at about 12:15 PM Eastern, and voting resumed, according to USA TODAY and the Akron Beacon Journal, citing Toledo Public Schools spokeswoman Patty Mazur. A 3:00 PM Eastern update from the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, reported by Nextgov, confirms that account. The same update resolves a question the midday edition left open: at least four other area schools received threats — among them Monac Elementary, Conneaut and Kenwood Elementary in Bowling Green, and schools in the Lake Local district — and none of them was used for voting. The threats remain claimed threats: officials have not stated whether they were credible or hoaxes, who made them, or whether they are connected, and no attribution has been made. No injuries have been reported.
What has not changed. The rest of the day’s picture is as the midday edition left it. In Fulton County, Georgia, voters received text messages about polling-location changes that the county says did not come from its election office; who sent them, how many voters received them, and whether any voter was misdirected remain unconfirmed. In Westchester County, paper ballots from the failed scanners are being held in sealed orange bags under state emergency procedures. In Oklahoma County, ballots from precincts with machine problems are secured in locked emergency bins to be counted Tuesday, and county officials said voting never stopped. In Florida, flooding has relocated polling places across the state — the afternoon sweep counts more than 20 sites in seven counties, after more than twenty inches of rain; tallies have varied by source and by hour, and every version attributes the moves to weather, openly published by state officials. Flood moves were also made in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and San Juan County, Utah. The Justice Department’s roughly 1,000 monitors and observers remain in all 50 states, with no credible report of any monitor intimidating a voter. San Diego County’s Registrar of Voters office, evacuated Monday over a suspicious suitcase, remains a Monday story: reopened at 4:45 PM, contents undisclosed, no arrests, intent unconfirmed. A record 57.5 million ballots were cast before today.
What has not happened. No ICE agents, armed federal agents, or federal troops have appeared at polling places — the latest sweep, at 2:51 PM Pacific, found no credible report of any of them, and USA TODAY reported Tuesday afternoon that there were no reports of armed federal agents or ICE at the polls. In Washington, D.C., the Attorney General has confirmed the National Guard was directed not to patrol polling sites, and none has been sighted at one. There is still no credible report of organized disruption anywhere in the country, and no bomb threat reported today outside the Toledo-area cluster. No race has been called in this desk’s record, and this desk makes no calls of its own.
The evening ahead. The first polls close at 6:00 PM Eastern in the eastern-time parts of Indiana and Kentucky — minutes from this edition — and closings then roll west through the evening, ending at 1:00 AM Eastern in Alaska’s Aleutians. North Carolina’s extended voting means its first statewide results are not expected until about 8:15 PM Eastern. The next edition is the early evening update. All 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats, and 36 governorships are being decided.
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