Voting nationwide has been mostly orderly, despite non-credible bomb threats from Russian origin

By CNN

Published November 5, 2024 1:38 PM

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By Tami Luhby, Eric Levenson and Jeremy Herb, CNN

(CNN) — Polls are starting to close in the eastern US while voting continues elsewhere as tens of millions of American voters head to the polls Tuesday to choose the country’s next leaders. Some counties in battleground states have started processing mail-in ballots amid high turnout, with officials predicting results will be ready later in the night or Wednesday. But in other locations, polls will stay open later because of disruptions during the day.

The voting process, officials said, has been going smoothly, even with issues caused by non-credible bomb threats from Russia and bad weather.

Several bomb threats at a few Michigan and Georgia polling places caused delays in the vote as security officials cleared the locations.

The threats “appear to originate from Russian email domains,” the FBI said midday Tuesday. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”

Wisconsin also received threats apparently aimed at disrupting voting, a US official said. In addition, there were “unsubstantiated” bomb threats made to four locations in Navajo County, Arizona, and state officials have “reason to believe” that the threats originated in Russia, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said Tuesday afternoon.

As in all elections, issues with voter eligibility, logistical problems, ballot functionality and vote-counting are being scrutinized closely Tuesday, especially amid former President Donald Trump’s false claims of mass election fraud.

As of mid-morning, extreme weather and other “temporary infrastructure disruptions” had been reported in parts of the US, but there hadn’t been any “national-level significant incidents impacting the security of our election infrastructure,” said Cait Conley, a senior adviser at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The issues so far are “largely expected, routine and planned-for events,” Conley added.

Several states are seeing heavy, if not record, turnout. Michigan was already seeing record voter turnout, on track to match its highest election turnout on record, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CNN on Tuesday afternoon.

Georgia is also on track to surpass 2020 turnout, state officials said.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, election workers had finished opening and scanning over 50% of the roughly 64,000 mail-in ballots returned, officials said mid-afternoon. All the mail-in ballots should be counted by midnight.

Also in Pennsylvania, Allegheny County workers have removed the initial batch of mail-in ballots in the warehouse from their envelopes and are now processing mail-in ballots that have been received Tuesday, according to the county executive’s office. Results will not be posted until after 8 p.m. ET.

Meanwhile, Milwaukee will rerun about 30,000 absentee ballots through tabulating machines “out of an abundance of caution” after finding evidence that the doors on its tabulating machines had not been closed properly, city spokesperson Jeff Fleming said. The problem was caused by human error, not tampering.

And vote tabulation of early ballots is going slower than expected in Maricopa County, home to a majority of battleground Arizona’s voters, a county official told CNN. The first release of 1.1 million to 1.2 million ballots, which will be at about 10 p.m. ET, will encompass only votes through October 29.

After the first drop, the county will post its next batch of votes, which includes those cast on Election Day, on Wednesday, said the official. The slower count stems from this year’s ballot being two pages, which is double the amount of paper to process.

And 15 polling locations in a “handful” of Georgia counties will stay open past 7 p.m. ET, including a dozen because of the bomb threats.

Non-credible threats, weather among issues

The non-credible threats to polling locations in Georgia and Michigan were the most significant issues thus far.

In Union City, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta, there were several non-credible bomb threats that caused the temporary closure of two polling locations, according to Nadine Williams, Fulton County Registration and Elections Director.

A voting location housing two polling precincts in Gwinnett County, Georgia, was also evacuated for about an hour because of what police call a bomb threat, according to the Gwinnett County Police Department.

Voting was also temporarily suspended at five polling places in DeKalb County, Georgia, due to bomb threats as police performed sweeps at those locations.

Michigan authorities also received threats to polling locations initially deemed “serious in nature” but found not to be credible after investigation by law enforcement, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told CNN.

The threats in Michigan and Wisconsin were also sourced to Russians, a US official said.

In addition, bad weather in various parts of the US could cause some challenges for people attempting to vote. Heavy rainfall flooded roadways and caused thousands of power outages in several states, while thunderstorms and damaging winds were predicted in other locations.

Further, in California, dry air and gusty winds are expected to ramp up for the Bay Area and Sacramento beginning Tuesday morning, which could lead to dangerous fire weather across the region. Pacific Gas & Electric may have to turn off power at five polling locations to stop fires from starting, but the utility has provided generators to prevent any disruptions.

There were also some minor reported issues that caused voting delays.

Voting time was extended in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, after a “software malfunction” disrupted voters’ abilities to scan their ballots, the Office of County Commissioners said. The county’s top election official, Scott Hunt, told CNN the malfunction was caused by a printing error, and new ballots are on their way to polling places. The ballots that were already cast but could not be read by the machine will be hand-counted, he said.

A polling place in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania — a conservative-leaning county near Scranton — will be opened for an additional 90 minutes this evening after election workers were delayed in opening the voting site Tuesday morning.

Yet for most people, voting was a simple process. At the Millersville Municipal Building polling location in Pennsylvania, a Republican voter named Janice told CNN the process to vote was “quick and easy.”

Despite these issues, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro predicted Tuesday that counting the vote won’t take nearly as long as it did in 2020, when counting in the Keystone State — and calling the election — stretched through the Saturday after the election.

Meanwhile, voters in Apache County, Arizona, encountered faulty voting machines and some were turned away before they could cast ballots on Election Day, with voting issues “the worst we’ve ever seen it,” Navajo Nation Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Katherine Belzowski told CNN. Some voters in Apache County were encountering wait times of over two hours because of the difficulties, and locations were running out of back up provisional ballots during the machine outage.

Voting integrity

The majority of voters are at least somewhat confident that this election will be well run, regardless of which candidate they support, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Election officials across the US have pledged to uphold the integrity of the vote and urged voters not to be misled by conspiracy theories.

“Here in Georgia, it is easy to vote and hard to cheat,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday. “Our systems are secure and our people are ready.”

Benson in Michigan warned voters to be cautious of “foreign bad actors” that will try to distract from the secure elections process.

“Don’t fall for it,” Benson said at a news conference Tuesday. “We know that they will use all sorts of misinformation and other tactics today and in the days ahead to create chaos, confusion, fear, division and sow seeds of doubt about what is a very clear, transparent and secure election process.”

The 2024 election has already featured allegations from Trump and other Republicans that the vote is “rigged.” Trump has made repeated false claims that Democrats are cheating in the election, and he’s twisted isolated problems with voting in an effort to prime his supporters to believe the election is not legitimate if he loses.

He has alleged that voting by noncitizens is a widespread problem, that there’s no verification for overseas or military ballots, that election officials are using early voting to commit fraud and that massive swaths of mail-in ballots are illegitimate. The claims are incorrect and baseless.

Broadly, US elections are an extraordinary undertaking: In 2020, more than 161 million voters cast ballots that were counted across 50 states, the District of Columbia and five US territories, at a total of 132,556 polling places and with the aid of 775,101 poll workers, according to the US Election Assistance Commission.

Federal elections are also largely decentralized, as local jurisdictions have the primary responsibility of tabulating, reporting and certifying results.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Isabel Rosales, Denise Royal, Sean Lyngaas, Ryan Young, Danny Freeman, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Katelyn Polantz, Jim Sciutto, Sara Murray, Tierney Sneed, Danya Gainor, Evan Perez, Emma Tucker, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Sarah Boxer, Brian Todd, Casey Tolan, Pamela Brown, Michael Conte, Jason Morris and meteorologists Elisa Raffa and Mary Gilbert contributed to this report.