Ahead of Election Day, anxiety was mounting over potential chaos at the polls.
Election officials have warned poll watchers who have been steeped in conspiracy theories falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Democrats and groups Voting rights activists worried about the effects of new election laws, in some Republican-controlled states, which President Joe Biden has decried as “Jim Crow 2.0.” The police were monitoring possible threats at the polls.
Still, Election Day and the weeks of early voting leading up to it went reasonably well. There were a few reports of unruly poll watchers disrupting voting, but they were scattered. Armed vigilante groups began surveilling a handful of ballot boxes in Arizona until a judge ordered them to stay away to make sure they wouldn’t intimidate voters. And while it may take months to understand their full impact, the GOP-backed election laws enacted after the 2020 election did not appear to cause major disruptions like they did in the March primary in Texas.
“The whole ecosystem has in many ways become more resilient in the aftermath of 2020,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver chief election officer who advises a number of voting rights organizations. “There was a lot of effort to make sure everything went smoothly.”
Even if some voting experts’ worst fears have not materialized, some voters have still experienced the kinds of routine mess that happens on a small scale with every election. Many of them fell disproportionately on black and Hispanic voters.
“Things went better than expected,” said Amir Badat of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “But we have to say this with a caveat: our expectations are low.”
Badat said his organization recorded long lines at various polling places from South Carolina to Texas.
There were particular problems in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Shortages of paper ballots and the late opening of at least one polling place led to long lines and sparked an investigation into the predominantly Democratic county by Republican state officials.
The survey partly reflects how some Election Day voting snafus are increasingly falling on Republican voters, who have been discouraged from using mail-in ballots or using in-person early voting. by Trump and his allies. But that’s a very different problem than what Texas had in its March primary.
Then, a controversial new election law that increased the requirements for mail-in ballots led to about 13% of all such ballots being rejected, which is much higher than for other elections. It was a worrying sign for a flurry of new laws, passed after Trump’s defeat of Biden and misrepresentations about mail-in voting, but no problems of this magnitude were reported for the general election.
Texas changed the design of its mail-in ballots, which solved many of the problems voters had with putting credentials in the right place. Other states that have added voting regulations did not appear to have widespread issues, though voting rights groups and analysts say it will take weeks to sift through the data to uncover the impacts of the laws. .
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is compiling data to determine whether new election laws in states like Georgia have contributed to lower turnout among black and Hispanic voters.
Preliminary figures show turnout has been lower this year than in the last midterm elections four years ago in Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Texas – four states that have enacted significant voting restrictions since the 2020 election – although there could be a number of reasons for this.
“It’s hard to judge, empirically, what kind of effect these laws have on voter turnout because so many factors come into play,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the United States Law School. University of California at Los Angeles. “You also have a lot of hype on the Democratic side that any type of change in election laws is going to have a major effect on the election, which turned out not to be the case.”
In Georgia, for example, Republicans made it more complicated to apply for absentee ballots after the 2020 election — among other things, requiring voters to include their driver’s license number or other form of identification rather than a signature. . That may be one of the reasons early in-person voting has grown in popularity in the state this year, and turnout is down only slightly from 2018.
Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, which advocates for tougher election laws, said the fairly strong turnout in the midterm elections shows fears about the new voting rules were overblown.
“We’re at the end of an election that was supposed to be the end of democracy, and it wasn’t,” Snead said.
Poll watchers were a significant concern for voting rights groups and election officials as Election Day approached. Representatives of the two main political parties are a key part of any secure electoral process, accredited observers who can oppose perceived violations of the rules.
But this year, groups aligned with conspiracy theorists who challenged Biden’s 2020 victory have heavily recruited pollwatchers, and some states have reported aggressive volunteers causing disruptions during the primary. But there were fewer problems in November.
In North Carolina, where several counties reported problems with poll watchers in the May primary, the state Board of Elections reported 21 incidents of ballot misconduct during the general election, most during early voting period in person and by campaign members. rather than poll watchers. Observers were responsible for eight of the incidents.
Voting experts were pleasantly surprised that there were no more problems with poll watchers, marking the second consecutive general election as a feared threat from aggressive Republican watchers failed to materialize.
“It seems like an increase from 2020. Is it a small increase? Yes,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “It’s still a dry run for 2024, and we can’t quite let our guard down.”
One of the main organizers of the poll-watching effort was Cleta Mitchell, a veteran Republican election lawyer who joined Trump in a January 2, 2020 call to Georgia’s top election official when the president asked the state to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner. Mitchell then started an organization to train volunteers who wanted to keep tabs on election officials, which was seen as driving the wave of poll watchers.
Mitchell said the relatively quiet election is vindication that groups like his were simply concerned about the integrity of the election rather than causing disruption.
“Each training provided by those of us who undergo such training included instructions on behavior and that they should be ‘peaceful, lawful, honest,'” Mitchell wrote in the conservative online publication The Federalist. . “Yet without evidence, the closer we got to election day, the more hysterical headlines became, warning of violence at the ballot box resulting from too many observers monitoring the process. This does not happen.
Voting rights groups say they are relieved their fears have not materialized, but they say threats to democracy remain on the horizon for 2024 – especially with Trump announcing he is running again. Wendy Weiser, an expert on voting and elections at the Brennan Center, agreed that overall things went smoother than expected.
“Overall, the sabotage did not occur,” Weiser said. “I don’t think that means we’re in the clear.”