By Catalina Clarke
Election Day Poll Watch — closing update. Catalina Clarke is Editor-in-Chief of The Library Media. This desk has monitored polling-place conditions across the country today; this is the sixth and final edition of the series.
The day, closed. The last polls in the United States closed at 10:00 PM Pacific tonight in Alaska’s Aleutians — 1:00 AM Eastern Wednesday — completing a closing roll that began at 6:00 PM Eastern in Indiana and Kentucky. This desk’s integrity watch, which swept for credible reports every 45 minutes from early morning, stood down at 10:18 PM Pacific. The day’s whole story, in one verdict, is this: voting was disrupted in a small number of places, by two bomb threats, by failed scanners, by machine problems, and by flooding — each handled in the open by state and county officials — and the larger fears that framed the morning did not materialize. No ICE agents, armed federal agents, or federal troops appeared at polling places. No organized disruption was credibly reported anywhere in the country. A record 57.5 million ballots had been cast before today. All 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats, and 36 governorships were being decided. This desk reports the conduct of the vote, not its results, and makes no race calls; no chamber-control call reported by the Associated Press or Reuters is in this desk’s record at the time of writing, so none is stated here.
The watchers, and where the watching crossed its line. The Department of Justice deployed roughly 1,000 election monitors and observers to all 50 states — by the department’s own description, the largest Election Day monitoring effort in its history, and about triple the roughly 289 personnel sent in the 2022 midterms, Reuters reported. Federal election monitoring dates to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monitors check compliance with federal voting-rights law; they cannot investigate on the spot, question voters, or stop anyone from voting. In a break from long-standing practice, federal prosecutors served among the monitors this year, though the department said they would not identify themselves as prosecutors to voters. Some states watched the watchers: Minnesota deployed about forty state employees, in pairs, to observe the federal observers; California built a system to monitor federal personnel; and Nevada trained local law enforcement to respond if any observer broke polling-place rules. The NAACP sued in October, alleging intimidation; a federal judge denied its emergency order.
For most of the day, the standing report was that no monitor had intimidated a voter. The closing record is narrower and more precise, and this edition corrects the series on the point. In Dearborn and Flint, Michigan, federal monitors asked poll workers for training materials and put questions to them outside the observer role, according to the Michigan Attorney General’s office, whose spokesperson Kimberly Bush raised the instances publicly; the Justice Department confirmed the requests were outside the monitors’ scope, the Detroit Free Press reported. Voting-rights groups also told USA TODAY that monitors asked voters what they described as unusual questions in isolated incidents — in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on November 2, and in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, with League of Women Voters chapters also reporting instances in Arizona, Maryland, New Mexico, and Ohio. The groups themselves described those incidents as isolated and said officials responded when they were raised. Nothing in the day’s reporting establishes a coordinated pattern, and officials have not confirmed those group reports as intimidation. What is established is that, in at least the two Michigan cities confirmed by the department itself, monitors stepped outside watching. The department’s monitors’ findings are to be reviewed after Election Day; the outcome of that review is unresolved at the close of polls.
Two bomb threats, two polling places. Only two polling places were emptied by bomb threats today, about twenty-five miles apart across the Ohio–Michigan line. In Toledo, Ohio, two threats were called in at about 10:30 AM Eastern to Beverly Elementary School. The polling place was evacuated and closed for one hour and fifteen minutes, according to Lucas County Board of Elections Deputy Director Tim Monaco; a K-9 sweep found nothing, police cleared the site at about 12:15 PM Eastern, and voting resumed, according to Toledo Public Schools spokeswoman Patty Mazur, reported by USA TODAY and the Akron Beacon Journal. At least four other area schools received threats the same morning — among them Monac Elementary in Toledo, Conneaut and Kenwood Elementary in Bowling Green, and schools in the Lake Local district — and a 3:00 PM Eastern update from the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, reported by Nextgov, confirmed none of them was used for voting. In Gibraltar, Michigan, a bomb threat reported at about 3:30 PM Eastern evacuated Carlson High School, the polling location for Brownstown Township Precincts 8 and 11, and voting was moved outside, according to the Brownstown Township Police Department, reported by The Detroit News via Monroe News and by WDIV Local 4. Voting resumed inside at 6:30 PM Eastern after an evacuation of about an hour, according to the Detroit Free Press, citing the Brownstown Township Police Department. Brownstown Police Chief Jeff Watson said a suspect was identified, and that voting was paused only for the time of the move outside, the Free Press reported. No injuries were reported at either location. Still unresolved tonight: officials have not stated whether either threat was credible or a hoax, whether the two are connected, or who made them; no attribution has been made for either, and no further details about the Gibraltar suspect were disclosed in the reporting reviewed.
Machinery. In Westchester County, New York, ballot scanners failed countywide from the 6:00 AM Eastern opening, confirmed by the County Board of Elections and attributed to ballot paper thickness. Voting continued; paper ballots were held in sealed orange emergency bags under state emergency procedures, to be counted. County Executive Ken Jenkins said the Board of Elections had not indicated a need to extend poll hours, and no extension was reported there. In Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, the county Election Board reported voting machine problems at multiple precincts at 8:50 AM Central, via News 9; affected ballots were secured in locked emergency bins to be counted Tuesday, technicians worked on the problems, and officials said voting never stopped. At precincts including Newalla Baptist Church, county election board secretary Doug Sanderson described ballot-reader jams as not uncommon. No cause was given for the Oklahoma problems, and there is no evidence in the day’s record of intentional or organized disruption in either county.
Weather. The largest number of moved polling places today was caused by flooding, not interference. In Florida, polling places were relocated under Governor Ron DeSantis’s emergency order, EO 26-227, after more than twenty inches of rain. Tallies varied by source and by hour: the Wall Street Journal counted at least 19 stations moved in eight counties — Brevard, Broward, Highlands, Indian River, Martin, Okeechobee, Palm Beach, and St. Lucie — Florida’s news service counted 21 sites covering 30 precincts, and a later sweep in this desk’s record counted more than 20 sites in seven counties. In Broward County, Precinct T018 at the Paradise Village Clubhouse in Davie flooded and closed, and its voters were redirected to Tree Tops Park. The state published the moves openly. Flood moves were also made in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and in San Juan County, Utah.
The day before, in San Diego. The week’s first evacuation came on Monday, November 2, at the San Diego County Registrar of Voters office in Kearny Mesa. A suspicious suitcase was found in the lobby at about 1:45 PM Pacific; the office was evacuated at about 3:10 PM, the sheriff’s bomb squad was called, and the office reopened at about 4:45 PM, when early voting resumed, according to NBC 7 San Diego and the county. A county spokesperson said voting and ballot processing were secure. Still unresolved tonight: the suitcase’s contents have not been disclosed, no arrests were made, and deliberate intent is unconfirmed.
The Fulton County texts. In Fulton County, Georgia, voters received text messages about polling-location changes that the county says did not come from its election office, USA TODAY reported. That is the whole verified record tonight. Who sent the messages, how many voters received them, and whether any voter was misdirected remain unconfirmed, and are listed here as unresolved.
The extensions, all now elapsed. Three sets of extended hours were granted today, and all have run out. In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections extended five precincts in four counties — Columbus, Hertford, Lenoir, and Wilson — to between 7:45 and 8:15 PM Eastern; anyone arriving after the normal 7:30 PM close voted provisionally, and the board expected the state’s first unofficial results at about 8:15 PM. In Chester County, Pennsylvania, the Court of Common Pleas extended three precincts — 201, 210, and 244, at Easttown Library, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, and Goshen Baptist Church — to 8:30 PM Eastern, with votes after 8:00 PM provisional. In Toledo, Beverly Elementary School stayed open latest in the East, until 9:15 PM Eastern, for provisional voting only, according to the Lucas County Board of Elections, with Dan Lusheck, a spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, confirming the provisional-only terms, reported by USA TODAY, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Akron Beacon Journal. No other court-ordered extension was found in the record this desk followed. One other item was checked and not counted: an evacuation in Vallejo, California, near Representative John Garamendi’s district office, reported by USA TODAY via the San Francisco Chronicle, was not at a polling place and remains claimed and unconfirmed as a polling incident.
What has not happened — the final verdict. The standing negatives held through the final sweeps, at 8:51 and 9:36 PM Pacific, and through the watch’s stand-down. No ICE agents appeared at polling places: Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters he did not send ICE agents to polling sites, and USA TODAY reported that armed federal authorities had not shown up at polls and described the day as largely uneventful. No federal troops appeared at polling places. In Washington, D.C., the Attorney General confirmed the National Guard was directed not to patrol polling sites, and none was sighted at one. The Associated Press reported Tuesday morning that voting had unfolded with relatively few problems, and that immigration agents at voting sites and federal seizures had not happened. There is still no credible report of organized disruption anywhere in the country. Two standing negatives from the morning edition did not survive the day, and the record should say so plainly: bomb threats were called in, at the two polling places above; and federal monitors, in the Michigan instances the department itself confirmed, acted outside their observer role. Everything else this desk warned it would watch for did not occur.
How the closing ran. Closings, in Eastern time, ran on the published schedule. At 6:00 PM, the Eastern-time parts of Indiana and Kentucky closed. At 7:00 PM, Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia closed, along with most of Florida and the remaining parts of Indiana and Kentucky. At 7:30 PM, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia closed, subject to the extensions above. At 8:00 PM, Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee closed, along with Washington, D.C., the Florida Panhandle, and most of Michigan, Texas, Kansas, and South Dakota. Arkansas closed at 8:30 PM. At 9:00 PM, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, and Wyoming closed, and the remaining parts of Texas, Kansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula. At 10:00 PM, Montana, Nevada, and Utah closed, with most of Idaho and Oregon’s Malheur County. At 11:00 PM, California, Washington, the rest of Oregon, and northern Idaho closed. At midnight, Hawaii and most of Alaska closed. Last, at 1:00 AM Eastern Wednesday — 10:00 PM Pacific tonight — Alaska’s Aleutians closed. Anyone in line at a site’s closing time could still vote under the rules in place at that site.
The count now continues in the open, in the same rooms where the voting happened. This desk’s watch is complete.
From The Library — the estate of our family.