Despite bomb threats and disinformation, a fairly smooth election

Americans navigated a fraught voting landscape on Election Day as a largely smooth voting process early in the day went on to be buffeted by bomb threats, widespread disinformation and unabated anxiety over the election system.

A vast majority of Americans were able to cast their votes unimpeded. But threats of violence — largely made through dozens of bomb threats, many in Democratic strongholds — proved a constant reminder of what risks becoming a new normal for voting in America.

Among the areas affected were DeKalb and Fulton counties in Georgia, two key Democratic areas with large populations of Black voters. Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, had 32 bomb threats alone (judges later ordered the Fulton and DeKalb sites to extend voting hours). The secretary of state in Georgia said the threats made early in the morning had come from Russia. Six other states — Maine, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio — also reported receiving bomb threats.

Election officials described the process as generally smooth, safe and secure; long lines were present but not widespread, and most glitches caused by machines or human error were swiftly addressed.

Former President Donald Trump tried to create a sense of widespread chaos in key cities, making claims of fraud in Detroit and Philadelphia without offering evidence. The Philadelphia district attorney said there was “no factual basis whatsoever” to Trump’s claims.

The day both revealed a system built to withstand multiple threats and at the same time exposed vulnerabilities that halted voting for periods, said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“On the one hand, people still turned out so it shows resilience,” Hewitt said. “There was no polling place that was absolutely shut down for the entirety of the day.”

He added: “But the other side of the coin is the fragility of democracy to threats foreign and domestic.”

Voters in key counties in battleground states already had to navigate bulletproof glass and security fences at polling locations. Some sites also saw the appearance of conservative activists hunting for examples of rare fraud.

For instance, partisan polling observers sought to copy down serial numbers from the backs of voting machines at a southwest Philadelphia precinct, leading to those people’s temporary expulsion.

The observers appeared to be keying off a persistent false narrative from 2020 about how voting machines had stolen votes from Trump.

After four years of such storylines, some Trump supporters have been primed to see fraud in the normal process of administering elections. And the day brought a stream of false allegations on social media that inflated inevitable Election Day glitches into something more nefarious that could feed efforts to challenge a losing result in the days ahead.

In Cambria County, Pennsylvania, a rural, Republican-leaning county east of Pittsburgh, machines were unable to scan voters’ ballots in the morning. The issue was eventually resolved, and a court ordered polling locations throughout the county to remain open two extra hours, until 10 p.m. Tuesday.

But Trump supporters on Elon Musk’s social network, X, suggested the problems were part of a plot to disenfranchise voters in a county that heavily favored Trump four years ago.

Officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency rebutted reports of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. “We have no data or reporting to support these claims,” said Cait Conley, a senior official.

In Milwaukee, election officials sought to head off another potential source of disinformation, after discovering that 13 tabulators had the doors covering their power switches and data ports unlocked. Officials said that they would have to retabulate 31,000 votes.

Shortly before polls closed, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a Republican, appeared at Milwaukee’s central counting center to question elections officials there.

Speaking with reporters afterward, he said he was unsatisfied with the officials’ answers and suggested that the state Republican Party would file a lawsuit if it did not get a full accounting. “I’m concerned about what happens in the wee hours of the morning,” Johnson said.

Milwaukee officials, though, said the problem was relatively minor.

“The greatest harm you could have done would be to reset the machine,” said Jeff Fleming, a city spokesperson, explaining that the additional step could add an hour or 90 minutes to the night’s count. “The corrective action has much more to do with providing a level of confidence with the results than anything else.”

The very present threat that Trump would try to overturn the results again added to the anxiety being expressed by voters at polling locations throughout swing states, many now equipped with panic buttons and police officers stationed outside.

Eleanor Boyle, 77, from Warminster Township in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, said that while she had faith in her state and national elections, the voting had left her anxious and unsettled. She feared Trump supporters would not accept a loss; she watched the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in horror.

“I’m very worried that there could be violence throughout the whole country, not just the Capitol,” said Boyle, who goes by Bunny. When she mentioned to her sewing group that she planned to volunteer at the polls, “people asked if I was afraid — even here, in Warminster.”

Officials said they were prepared. As Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner put it while warning those who might make trouble at polling stations, “F around and find out.”

Late Tuesday, election officials in Washington Township, near Pittsburgh, moved swiftly to head off a local plan to conduct a hand audit, which was not permitted under state law, by winning an emergency court order blocking it.

But there was also a level of hypervigilance that led to accusations of voter intimidation that did not pan out. For instance, a report that conservative activists had “intimidated” voters outside a polling station in Lee County, North Carolina, amounted to an overheard, harsh comment directed at a Latino voting rights group at the same polling station.

Some places that had been hot spots in the 2020 election were relatively serene Tuesday night. Daniel Baxter, director of elections for Detroit, said just after the polls closed that there had been a stark difference at Huntington Place convention center this time compared with 2020.

Four years ago, the convention center, then known as the TCF Center, was the site of a dramatic and chaotic scene as Republicans grew angry, and things nearly turned into a riot as the count stretched into the early morning hours.

The convention center Tuesday evening was calm and orderly.

“No one is banging on windows,” Baxter told reporters Tuesday. “I think I hear people singing ‘Kumbaya.’” He continued: “It’s very peaceful here today.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said voting had gone largely smoothly in her state Tuesday, as was to be expected; she recalled that Election Day in Michigan in 2020 was largely calm, and that disputes did not break out until the counting process began. This year, she said, poll workers, election officials and law enforcement are ready for it.

“The important thing for me to let people know is that there’s going to be accountability,” said Nessel, a Democrat.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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