Voter turnout surges past 2022 levels Voter turnout has surged in the lead up to this year’s midterm election, with the number of early ballots cast significantly outstripping the totals from the 2022 midterm.
Elections workers across the country were expecting that trend to continued into election day. Officials in states including North Carolina, Georgia, and Michigan — a major battleground – reported strong turnout in the opening hours of voting.
By the afternoon, Florida’s Division of Elections reported more than 1,860,000 votes had been cast on election day.
Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said 775,000 votes had been cast, with an expected total turnout of 1.4 million votes by the close of polling
"Technical Issues" across multiple districts
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New York - Westchester county official addresses voting machine malfunctions affecting up to 250,000 ballots
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Technical issues reported across several Mississippi counties
Trump admin harassing voters and officials in LA
The US justice department sent a last-minute surge of election monitors into Los Angeles this morning, the LA Times (paywall) reports, amid an ongoing legal back-and-forth with the Trump administration over California’s 20,000 contested ballots.
The Golden State and the Trump administration have been in a legal standoff over the past few weeks following the DoJ’s claim that 20,000 non-citizens were on the state’s voter rolls.
The administration’s demands to set aside the contested ballots were struck down by the supreme court on Monday, but in a series of rulings later last night and earlier today, the San Francisco-based 9th circuit court of appeals cleared the administration to threaten state election workers with criminal charges.
That came just after the justice department announced it was sending out “1,000 election monitors and observers” across the United States in what it described as “the largest monitoring effort in DoJ history” – in a move widely viewed as an intimidation tactic.