Amid palpable anxiety that the Trump administration would interfere with the midterms, Tuesday’s elections unfolded smoothly, with mostly minor, standard-issue hiccups.
The Justice Department sent more than 900 monitors to polling locations across the country, a historically large deployment. But fears that they would interfere with the day’s operations — or that troops or ICE agents would be deployed — proved unfounded.
More tests may arrive over the coming days and weeks as states complete their ballot counts and close contests are flyspecked. The Trump administration has already signaled plans to question results in California based on unproven allegations that noncitizens could vote, and in Alaska, based on Democratic maneuvering to facilitate the candidacy of a man whose name was quite similar to the incumbent GOP senator’s.
But experts, buoyed by Tuesday’s smooth operations, said American democracy had passed a critical test in the face of enormous pressure. And with sweeping wins for Democrats in both the House and the Senate, President Donald Trump told the New York Times late Tuesday night that he would accept the results. Across the country, losing candidates conceded their races to their opponents rather than suggesting any form of malfeasance.
“Today was an absolute massive success for voters, election workers and everyone who cares about democracy,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO at Common Cause, a voting rights and civil liberties group. She noted isolated reports of long lines, inadequate signage at polling stations, problems with voting machines and, in Florida, flooding. But she said these are “things we see every election and that our election officials are prepared to solve.”
Much of the pre-Election Day anxiety among Democrats surrounded the possibility that Trump would send troops or immigration agents to the polls as an intimidation technique, something some officials had declined to rule out in advance. But at the White House on Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters that he did not send Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and there were no reports of troops, either.
“It was smooth,” said Trey Grayson, a Republican who previously oversaw elections as Kentucky’s secretary of state. “Some of the concerns about ICE and troops and election monitors and AI and hacking and all this — it doesn’t appear to have happened.”
With Trump saying he would accept the results and Republican candidates conceding across the country, wide-ranging challenges to the elections are unlikely, said Stephen Richer, a Republican who previously administered elections for Arizona’s Maricopa County.
“This movement takes its marching orders from the president,” he said of the election deniers loyal to Trump. “Without the president beating the drum, you’re not going to have the amount of political pressure that’s needed to really make it significant.”
As with any election, there were pockets of trouble, but of the normal variety. More than 20 polling locations in Florida had to be relocated because of flooding. Five polling sites in North Carolina stayed open an extra 25 to 45 minutes because of delays earlier in the day. A polling site outside Kansas City turned away dozens of voters in the morning after the county’s elections office mistakenly delivered 100 ballots instead of 1,000 ballots to that precinct.
And in some pockets of the country, improperly programmed voting machines caused various hiccups. For instance, a programming error in New York’s Westchester County prevented ballots from being scanned until the machines could be updated. Rep. Mike Lawler (R), the incumbent in the House race there, said he was confident the votes would be counted, but conservatives seized on the situation to suggest malfeasance.
“This is how the Left steals elections,” podcaster Katie Miller, who is married to White House adviser Stephen Miller, wrote on X. Conservative influencers including Laura Loomer and Scott Presler made similar claims.
Trump and his allies had primed his supporters for much more. Ahead of Tuesday’s voting, they injected a relentless stream of doubt about the legitimacy of the election, with posts and commentary priming supporters to question results if Republicans lose. Those posts ramped up in the final week.
Last week, Trump promised a $1 million bounty to anyone who reports voter fraud that leads to conviction, but he gave no indication of how someone could apply for a payment. On the eve of the election, Attorney General Todd Blanche urged people on X to report “illegal conduct,” including noncitizen voting and ballot-box stuffing, to the FBI. And late on Election Day, as voters continued to cast ballots, Mullin warned that illegal voting could lead to five years in prison and $250,000 fines.
In recent weeks, the Justice Department has lodged cases against more than 200 people for noncitizen voting, a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of voters who participated in Tuesday’s election.
Democrats said they remained braced for interference in the coming days. The top election official in Los Angeles County said Tuesday that officials have “contingency plans in place” for any federal efforts to stop vote counting early. “I am on guard and on the lookout for this administration trying to essentially discard or reject or not accept the results if it doesn’t go their way,” Reyna Walters-Morgan, the Democratic National Committee vice chair for voter participation, said late Tuesday.
Some of the most widespread apprehensions ahead of Tuesday revolved around the Justice Department’s plans to deploy a record number of election monitors, a standard practice that critics worried would morph into interference.
On Tuesday, the agency sent more than 900 monitors to some 120 jurisdictions in all 50 states in a quest to ensure election integrity. Nearly two-thirds of the jurisdictions chosen have consistently voted for Democrats in recent elections, according to a Washington Post analysis. That was not much different from the partisan breakdown during the Biden administration.
Despite the concerns, no major incidents were reported. In Michigan, officials said they fielded reports that monitors had stepped beyond their bounds by asking poll workers about their training or for copies of their training material. In New Mexico, officials said they had verified reports that monitors were asking “unusual” questions.
There were also reports about “concerning” monitor activity in St. Louis, with some voters reporting that the monitors had asked whether the “voters felt pressured into voting a particular way and whether they feel coerced in any way,” said Denise Lieberman, the director and general counsel of the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition, a nonpartisan election protection program.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said Tuesday that his state had deployed 1,000 election monitors to watch the federal government’s monitors and to “hold the line against Trump’s goons,” as he put it on X.
But none of this amounted to much, and a Justice Department spokesperson said they were following their ordinary practices.
“It has, knock on wood … turned out to be a normal Election Day in Minnesota,” said Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, state director of Common Cause Minnesota. “The temperature’s really come down.”
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