Concerns put to rest
Record early vote leads to tranquil Election Day at polls
Despite fears of clashes at polling places, chaos sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and confusion due to disinformation and swiftly-changing voting rules, millions across the U.S. cast ballots in a historically contentious election with few problems.
About 103 million votes were cast before Election Day, an early voting push prompted by the pandemic. That took some of the pressure off polling places on Tuesday, which generally saw short or no lines as coronavirus cases were on the rise. Daily confirmed cases were up 43 percent over the past two weeks in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Every Election Day comes with problems as millions of people try to cast ballots simultaneously in 50 states. But experts were relieved they were relatively rare at a time when partisan battles over voting reached a fever pitch.
“We were bracing for the worst, and we've been pleasantly surprised,” said Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
Though the casting of ballots was relatively tranquil, legal storm clouds hang over the counting of those votes. Both parties had fought a massive battle in the courts trying to shape the contours of the election, and that seemed likely to continue beyond Tuesday.
President Donald Trump early Wednesday said he would take the election to the Supreme Court, although it was unclear what legal action he might pursue. The GOP has laid the groundwork for an effort to exclude ballots that arrived after polls closed in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, something several other states permit. Trump has railed over several days about the high court's preelection refusal to rule out those ballots and said he'd go in “with lawyers.”
Trump has spent much of the campaign groundlessly trying to sow doubt about the accuracy of the vote count and casting doubt on mail balloting. It led to great voter stress — but fears didn't materialize at the polls.
“A lot of people were fearful to come out and vote today, and for me I didn' t want fear to stop me from voting on Election Day,” said Sadiyyah Porter-Lowdry, 39, who cast her ballot at a church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In Iowa, hand sanitizer on voters' hands caused ballot counting machines to jam briefly in Des Moines, but the problem was fixed and voting went smoothly. Officials reported a calm day.
“No armed people, no protesters, no pickups with Trump flags like they've seen elsewhere. Our voters have been `Iowa Nice' throughand-through, and they have been patient,” said Joel Miller, the commissioner of elections in Linn County, the state's second largest, which includes Cedar Rapids.
In Pennsylvania, a judge in Democrat Joe Bi den' s hometown of Scranton extended voting at two precincts inside an elementary school for 45 minutes beyond the normal 8 p.m. close of voting because machines had been down earlier in the day, said Lackawanna County spokesman Joe D'Arienzo. The last Las Vegas-area voters cast their ballots shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday after a court order kept 30 polling places open later in Nevada's largest county, where some polling places had been slow to open.
There also were a few other issues with voting technology. Electronic pollbooks from voting equipment vendor Know Ink failed in Ohio's second-largest county and in a small Texas county, forcing voting delays as officials replaced them with paper pollbooks.