From an administrative point of view, the election earlier this week could be considered smooth—almost boring, in fact—despite a handful of technical issues and fake bomb threats. One quote going around in election admin circles: “We (heart) boring elections.”
And there’s a reason it went that way: Legislatures have spent the last four years looking at election administrative policies, clarifying procedures and tweaking the modes of voting available in their states after an extraordinary pandemic election in 2020. And election officials have spent that time implementing those statutory changes and planning for every possible Election Day scenario.
And it showed. They were ready for anything that came at them, and they responded quickly to the few issues that did come up.
There were the usual technical hiccups that delayed the openings of some polling places. Flash flooding in St. Louis led to temporary power outages at polling locations and, sadly, the death of two poll workers on their way to work. Somewhere in the country, there is almost always an example of a car running into a polling place. Several locations in swing states had long lines when polls closed, but everyone who was in line to vote before closing was permitted to do so.
Two significant issues related to voting equipment stand out, both due to simple human error. In Cambria County, Pa., scanning machines weren’t able to read ballots due to a printing error. Officials moved to Plan B and had voters cast their paper ballots into a secure ballot box, rather than into the scanning machine. On election night, the county began duplicating ballots, with representatives of each party watching, to ensure that the votes could be counted by scanning machines. This is a standard but time-consuming process for ballots that cannot be read by tabulation machines. As of midday today, the process was not complete, delaying the determination of which party controls the Pennsylvania House.
In Milwaukee, a high-speed scanning machine at the city’s central counting facility was found to be improperly closed. The panel door covering the machine’s power switch was unlocked—an oversight noticed by an election observer. There was no indication that the machine had been tampered with but, in response, election officials rescanned all of the 30,000 absentee ballots that had been sent through tabulators earlier that day.
The good news is that these errors were found and fixed. All election results are unofficial before they are certified in the days and weeks after an election, so there’s still time for every eligible vote to be counted.
The biggest story from an administrative point of view was a series of bomb threats received by election officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Law enforcement quickly determined they were hoaxes and distributed that information to other states so they could be prepared. Some polling locations were evacuated, and voting was temporarily disrupted; in those cases, hours were extended and voting continued.
Election officials have been under a microscope over the last few years, but they’ve spent that time checking and double-checking their processes and planning for anything. And it paid off. They faced challenges, they adapted and they administered a smooth election.
Katy Owens Hubler is a project manager in NCSL’s Elections and Redistricting Program.