US Midterms Run Mostly Smooth, With a Few Polling Sites Tripping Up

Voting across the US midterms rolled out largely without drama on Tuesday, with just a scattering of glitches as tens of millions of Americans cast ballots and control of Congress sat on the line. Polling places filled up, lines moved, and election officials reported nothing resembling a systemic breakdown.

New York's Westchester county was the loudest headache. Machines at 332 polling locations couldn't scan as many as 250,000 ballots, and some refused paper ballots outright. County executive Kenneth Jenkins told reporters voters were never blocked — they were handed emergency ballots, sealed into orange bags and set aside to be counted later. Parts of the county sit inside New York's closely watched 17th congressional district, where Republican Mike Lawler is fighting to keep his seat.

Kansas had a paperwork facepalm: one polling place ran dry on ballots after a county clerk error left officials ordering 100 paper ballots instead of 100,000. In Georgia, officials asked for permission to rescan more than 1,000 early votes after two scanners malfunctioned — one of them run over by a wheelchair, according to WSB-TV. Mississippi logged a precinct that opened late, machines that briefly went down, state agency websites with accessibility problems and voters double-checking their registration.

Tennessee drew a different kind of complaint, with voters saying touch-screen machines flipped their picks — selecting Republican candidates when they tried to choose Democrats. Like Westchester, some polling spots in Tennessee and Oklahoma reached for emergency bins to hold ballots that hit complications, with those votes slated to be counted after polls closed. Technicians were dispatched nationwide to sites reporting trouble.

In North Carolina, the state board of elections weighed keeping polls open four extra hours in counties where technical difficulties hampered voting, and pushed the release of results back an hour, now set for 8:30pm. Milwaukee saw minor issues tied to poll worker error — the same subject that has fueled recent litigation there. Massachusetts hit small technical snags in four precincts, which officials said were fixed by the morning.