Election Day 2022 Control of Congress at stake as voters head to polls

Control of Congress is at stake Tuesday as voters head to the polls at the close of a tumultuous midterm season in which Democrats and Republicans have clashed over the economy, abortion, crime and other salient issues. Republicans are confident that they will pick up the five seats they need to flip control of the House, while a handful of fiercely fought Senate races will determine which party controls that now evenly divided chamber. Also on the ballot Tuesday: gubernatorial races in 36 states, where abortion policy, voting rights and scores of other issues will play out for years to come.

PHOENIX — Problems with machines at some voting locations in Maricopa County, home to more than half of Arizona’s voters, became grist for prominent right-wing voices who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election to claim without evidence that Tuesday’s vote was also fraudulent.

Tabulators at about 20 percent of the 223 voting locations in the county were experiencing problems, county officials told The Washington Post. Elections officials were fixing the problems and advised voters to either wait for tabulators to come back online, go to another voting location or to drop ballots in secure slots. Ballots dropped in the slots are counted either at the end of the day, or in the coming days, at the county’s tabulation center in downtown Phoenix, said Megan Gilbertson, spokesperson for the county’s election department.

County officials stressed that no one was being prevented from voting and that no one’s ballot had been mishandled. They have said for weeks counting of ballots could take as many as 12 days.

Critics of Arizona’s voting systems seized on the tabulation machine problems on Twitter and conservative social media sites, offering them as examples of a need to overhaul the state’s voting systems. One post included a video of a poll worker advising voters of their options and had already been viewed more than half a million times. It was posted by Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of the political arm of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA. That group supports in-person voting at individual precincts on election day and Bowyer has been critical of the state’s early voting system.

Those preemptively suggesting something nefarious was occurring included Blake Masters, Arizona’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. Masters, who is vying to unseat Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), was the most prominent candidate to amplify the suspicions, painting isolated incidents of mechanical errors as a Democratic ploy. “Hard to know if we’re seeing incompetence or something worse,” he wrote. “All we know right now is that the Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home.”

Researchers tracking the spread of online misinformation said problems with voting machines were among the most common drivers of conspiracy theorizing early Tuesday, with the narrative stretching beyond Arizona and reaching Michigan and Pennsylvania as well.