2022 midterm election results

There have been isolated incidents of e-poll books going down in Detroit, Michigan, according to Jake Rollow, a spokesperson for Michigan Department of State.

Rollow said he has heard a "couple reports" that e-poll books in Detroit have gone down, but "not that many."

Kristina Karamo, the GOP nominee for Michigan Secretary of State, tweeted misinformation on Tuesday, claiming that there was “fraud” and a “crime” in Detroit because some voters who showed up to their precincts were told they already voted absentee.

Former President Donald Trump already picked up Karamo’s claim, and said on his Truth Social account, “the absentee ballot situation in Detroit is REALLY BAD. People are showing up to Vote only to be told, “sorry, you have already voted.” This is happening in large numbers, elsewhere as well. Protest, Protest, Protest.”

But remember: Rollow from the Michigan Secretary of State’s office has already addressed this and said the issue had already been resolved.

Every precinct should have a paper backup of the voter registration list in case there are issues with the e-poll book, Rollow said. "It obviously could take a bit longer just to look somebody up on paper rather than looking them up on your computer, but it shouldn't impact a voter's ability to vote in any way."

"There's no reason to expect that it would be, you know, taking place more broadly or in any way, you know, connected across jurisdictions," Rollow said, adding that officials would look into the issue to make sure.

As of 8 a.m. local time this morning, 2,016,147 absentee ballots had been requested in Michigan, and 1,716,264 had been submitted, Rollow added.

Polls in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, will stay open until 10 p.m. ET tonight, per an order from county judge Lesa S. Gelb.

In the order, Gelb said voters in the county were “disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote … through no fault of their own.”

Attorneys petitioning for the extension of time cited a paper shortage at polling locations, that ultimately resulted in the inability to print paper ballots and necessitated the use of emergency and provisional ballots, resulting in delays for voters.

The judge ordered that all election officials be immediately alerted to the extended voting hours.

Luzerne County is located in Northeast Pennsylvania, and encompasses Wilkes-Barre, the county’s largest city.

The North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to allow three polling precincts to close an hour later in North Carolina after their opening was delayed on Election Day.

Wilson County's Sanoca Fire Station, the Gaddys Community Building polling precinct in Robeson County and the Ransom precinct in Columbus County will all close at 8:30 p.m. ET, the board voted. 

Voters would vote with provisional ballot after 7:30 p.m. ET, said the board during a meeting Tuesday on the issue.

We're "talking about less than a half dozen precincts today and there's over 2,600 precincts here in North Carolina. So, what we're about to do is just to make sure that polling places are open no more and no less than the statutory. The statutes require us," said Damon Circosta, chair of the North Carolina Board of Elections ahead of the vote.

Extending the closing "offers consistency amongst all three of those precincts and it makes sure that we're not staying. Keeping our election workers there so terribly late at night, so it's balancing the needs of the voters with the needs of election administration," said the chair.

The Gaddys Community Building polling place in Robeson County "opened approximately one hour late because the building was locked and the voters did not have the correct access code to enter the building," North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said.  

"Additionally, three sites in Columbus County were delayed in opening due to the check-in computers not being connected properly to the printers and therefore the workers were unable to print the voters' authorization to vote forms," she said. 

NCSBE will start releasing initial results at approximately 7:30 p.m. ET for all counties where the polls close at that time.   

In all less than 45 voters were impacted and several returned or were offered provisional ballots, according to the board. 

An extra verification process to ensure voters didn’t vote both by mail and in person could delay counting ballots and getting election results in Philadelphia, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia City Commissioners told CNN on Tuesday.

“We’re going to go as fast as we can go; I don’t think anybody knows yet” when the count will be done, Kevin Feeley, a spokesperson for the commissioners’ office told CNN. 

Philadelphia elections officials have received around 120,000 mail-in ballots so far — a much smaller number than the over 350,000 mail-in ballots they counted during the 2020 general election, Feeley said, adding that means it will likely not take as long to count and verify the votes as the 2020 election did.

Some background: Delays could happen because the city commissioners voted Tuesday morning for elections officials to do what’s known as a “reconciliation process” during the Election Day count – where elections officials check to make sure voters who voted by mail also didn’t show up to vote in person. Other counties do the reconciliation process after votes are tallied.

“That’s probably going to be sometime tomorrow, the reconciliation,” Feeley told CNN. “And that impacts when we’re finished. We’re going to go as fast as we can go; we’re going to have shifts working around the clock.”

Voters head to the polls Tuesday to elect federal and state leaders in the 2022 Midterm elections.

Here are some scenes showing voters casting their ballots and polling workers and volunteers working the voting precincts across the country.

An apparent cyberattack on the website of the clerk of Champaign County, Illinois, caused a brief delay in the clerk’s ability to access their registration information on Tuesday morning but did not prevent anyone from voting, County Clerk Aaron Ammons told CNN.

“We haven’t had to turn anyone away,” Ammons said, adding that the issue had been mitigated by early Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve had the inability for certain sites to pull up our voter registration program. It would give us an error message on connectivity.”

It’s unclear who was responsible for the apparent hack. Ammon said his IT team has been fending off hacks for the last month that try to knock their website offline. Voters should know that their ability to cast a ballot has not affected by the incident, he added. Champaign County is in east central Illinois.

“Please stay in line!” Champaign County said on its Facebook page. “Election judges and staff are doing everything they can to process voters according to the requirements of election law while navigating these attacks." 

The incident is an example of the unpredictable events on Election Day that federal, state and local officials have long been drilling for. Local government websites are not involved in tallying votes but typically provide voting information to the public.

At a briefing with reporters Tuesday, CISA officials said they hadn’t heard about the apparent attack but would look into it. 

As Democrats brace for midterm losses, the intra-party blame is game set to boil over in the weeks ahead, prompting the White House to separate President Joe Biden and his agenda from the list of targets. 

The White House circulated an Election Day memo to allies underscoring that more than two dozen individual poll results demonstrate the popularity of the key individual elements of Biden’s agenda, ranging from his cornerstone legislative achievements to his actions on student loans, marijuana and his administration’s response to Covid-19.

“Before all the votes have even been cast, pundits are declaring that these midterms have been a referendum on the President’s agenda – nothing could be further from the truth,” the memo, which was obtained by CNN, says in its introduction.

Yet even Biden has acknowledged that his agenda, no matter how it polls in isolation, hasn’t translated to an American public that has taken a largely negative view on the direction of the country. “We’ve passed so many good things ... people haven’t realized how good they are yet,” he said at a fundraising event last week.

The effort to get in front of expected losses comes after months of frontline Democratic candidates actively seeking to separate themselves from Biden. It’s a reality advisors say Biden doesn’t take personally. After 36 years in the Senate, Biden’s view has long been that the candidates know what’s best for their state or district. But as Biden’s approval ratings started to inch up in the last few months, White House officials have bristled at the view that he was a singular drag on Democrats. 

Instead, they have pointed to the combination of history and economic headwinds. Nearly all of Biden’s recent predecessors that one-party control of Washington faced major midterm losses. The fact Americans have faced persistent inflation near four-decade highs only compounds the political difficulty. 

Election Day voting in Wisconsin is going smoothly, without any significant problems, said Wisconsin’s top election official Tuesday.

“As of this afternoon, there are no major issues that have been reported,” Meagan Wolfe, the nonpartisan administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said at a press conference. “Election Day in Wisconsin is going smoothly.”

The commission had received some “very minor reports earlier today of lines at the polling places around the state,” as well as “routine calls and questions,” Wolfe added.

Polls in the state close at 8 p.m. central time, and those waiting in line at the time can still vote, Wolfe reminded voters.  

As of Tuesday morning, voters had requested about 815,000 absentee ballots and returned about 742,000 of them, including about 318,000 in-person absentee ballots, she noted.

Acknowledging that some jurisdictions could take until Wednesday morning to complete their tallies of absentee ballots, Wolfe said, “election officials are always going to value accuracy over speed.”

“There are observers in that same room until the very last ballot is counted,” Wolfe said. “There really is no part of the election administration process that’s done behind a locked door.”

A video of an election official explaining a problem with vote tabulations outside a polling location in Maricopa County, Arizona, earlier Tuesday morning is spreading on social media, clocking up millions of views. The video, which was posted by a Republican activist, has already been viewed more than 2.5 million times on Twitter.

The clip is largely being amplified by right-wing personalities, some of whom are claiming — without evidence — that the machine issues are a sign of fraud. 

“We’ve anticipated legitimate mistakes and issues with election infrastructure being reframed as fraud," Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies the spread of disinformation, told CNN. 

The video shows an election worker in the Phoenix suburb of Anthem explaining a problem with tabulation machines rejecting ballots. 

Election officials quickly responded, saying they were working on the issue and that voters whose ballots were not being accepted by a tabulation machine could put their ballot in a secure box and they would be counted after the polls close. 

“No one is being disenfranchised. And none of this indicates any fraud or anything of that sort. This is a technical issue,” said Bill Gates, chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors and a Republican himself. 

A county spokeswoman added that the poll worker in the viral video did what they were supposed to. “That poll worker at Anthem was doing their job, providing voters the information they need to participate in this election, and the options they have. He was calm and transparent,” said Megan Gilbertson of the county’s election department. 

CNN's Bob Ortega contributed to this reporting