Election Day largely running smoothly, with just a handful of issues

America voted on Tuesday. In public schools and church basements, on tribal reservations and at kitchen tables, tens of millions of voters cast ballots with few hiccups on the final day of what can now be called election season in the most divisive and high-stakes presidential contest in U.S. history.

Many if not most Americans voted ahead of Election Day this year, solidifying the popularity and convenience of voting early or by mail and contributing to the smoothness of the day, with only scattered problems at polling locations. In a race expected to hinge on the outcome in seven battleground states, the year’s novel voting patterns left Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday nervously tracking voter turnout, line lengths and other ordinary problems that surface when millions of people vote.

In Pennsylvania, a software malfunction in Cambria County temporarily prevented ballots from being scanned countywide, according to local election officials – an issue that some Republicans quickly and baselessly alleged to be a targeted attack on the heavily GOP area.

In Arizona, voters in populous Maricopa County struggled to slog through a two-page ballot with hundreds of races that caused long lines.

And in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) blamed Russia for a series of noncredible bomb threats leveled against polling centers in the Atlanta region. But he said the threats hadn’t stopped the state from lodging record-breaking turnout.

“We identified the source; it was from Russia,” he said at a news conference Tuesday morning. “They think if they can get us to fight among ourselves, they can count that as a victory.”

The threats come after federal officials issued various warnings in recent days over tactics by Russia to cause disruptions during the election and afterward.

The FBI said Tuesday morning that a video purportedly released by the bureau claiming people should “vote remotely” because of high terrorism threats at polling stations is false. A second video containing a fake FBI news release and claiming that operators of five prisons in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania conspired with a political party and rigged inmate voting is also false, the FBI said.

“Attempts to deceive the public with false content about FBI threat assessments and activities aim to undermine our democratic process and erode trust in the electoral system,” the statement said.

Federal law enforcement officials were also posted at the National Election Command Post at FBI headquarters in Washington on Tuesday, monitoring potential domestic and international threats as Americans cast their ballots.

The command center will be staffed 24 hours a day and will operate through at least Saturday, longer than in previous elections. Officials said that is because of concerns over potential post-election confusion, violence or problems with voting certification. The 55 FBI field offices across the country also have command centers set up to monitor the elections in their districts, working with the command center at the bureau’s D.C. headquarters when problems arise.

For the most part, voters cast their ballots around the country without incident. Even before polls opened on Tuesday, nearly 82 million voters had cast early ballots, either in person or through the mail. That’s more than half the overall number that voted in 2020. Tens of millions more voted Tuesday.

Voting administrators were performing their duties amid stepped-up security after facing years of threats from some supporters of former president Donald Trump who believe his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Voters cast their ballots in an extraordinary range of ways and places. Marcela Rios, 55, entered the glistening, jet-black home of the National Football League’s Las Vegas Raiders so she could vote Tuesday. Rios, who until recently worked sanitizing slot machines, said she was worried about rising rents during Joe Biden’s presidency but decided to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Trump, all the time, calls immigrants dangerous,” said Rios, who came to the United States from Mexico in 1984. “No, we’re coming here to work. He’s a racist. One hundred percent.”

To Dell Foster, a Republican who cast his ballot in Phoenix, “basic freedom” was on the line. Foster said he voted for Trump and other Republicans down the ballot on Tuesday. No matter who wins, he said, he will trust the outcome: “I have ultimate faith in what they did here. They did a great job,” Foster said of election workers.

Some in Arizona complained that it took them between 30 and 45 minutes to fill out their two-page ballots – the longest in nearly 20 years. Others complained of poor lighting inside a church polling site. But by and large, Republicans and Democrats said the voting process went smoothly – and they were relieved to get it over with.

“It’s the kind of day we want, and I’m knocking on wood right now,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said in the morning.

Olga Melnyk, a 33-year-old stay-at-home mother, voted for Trump in Mesa, a fast-growing city east of Phoenix. With her 2-year-old daughter on her arm, she said she blamed Democrats for high costs that had made food, gas and child care unaffordable. She said she and her husband, who owns an auto body shop, have been struggling to buy a home.

“I’m excited, and I hope everything is going to turn around for the better after this election,” Melnyk said.

In Pennsylvania, the Cambria County Board of Elections said in a statement that it learned of the software issue early Tuesday and was quickly working to rectify it, pledging that every vote would be counted. A court approved the board’s petition to extend voting time to 10 p.m., instead of the planned 8 p.m. close.

Republicans have spent more than a year recruiting election observers and said they were deploying thousands of volunteers to the polls. Democrats also sent observers to voting sites, as did the Justice Department and the House Administration Committee.

The Republican-led committee said its observer program was its largest in history. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wisconsin), sent letters to election officials that said the observers “exist solely to gather information with respect to the election should the election later be contested in the House of Representatives.”

This time around, Trump did not expect his supporters to engage in violence.

“Of course there will be no violence. My supporters are not violent people,” Trump told reporters at his polling place in Palm Beach, Florida. “I certainly don’t want any violence, but I certainly don’t have to tell – these are great people.”

As the day went on, long lines formed in some areas, including in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Hundreds of college students at Villanova University in the Philadelphia suburbs waited as long as three hours to vote.

Massive lines of students were also reported at other campuses across the state, including the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania State University. Voters at colleges in Northampton County, a bellwether that has a near-perfect record in choosing the presidential winner, also stood in hourslong lines. The county sent extra voting machines to Lehigh University and Lafayette College to accommodate the huge student turnout.

At a library in a predominantly Black community in Atlanta, a steady stream of mostly Black voters turned out as a DJ across the street played a hip-hop soundtrack and dancing volunteers waved signs pointing to the voting site.

With Harris on the ballot, LaTarsha Holden said she decided to come in person Tuesday to experience the history of voting for a fellow Black woman for president.

“I wanted the feeling, just the thrill, like the taste of a morning cup of coffee, of coming in on Election Day,” Holden, 52, an author and public speaker, said after she cast her ballot at a precinct inside the Metropolitan Library in Atlanta. “Today was to me a very important day, and I wanted to savor the moment.”

She called the 2024 election “just as important as when Barack Obama ran.”

Others rushed home to the swing state after the Georgia Supreme Court reversed a lower-court ruling that had extended the deadline for more than 3,000 Cobb County voters to turn in absentee ballots. Some shared their experiences on social media.

“Y’all, why am I in the airport about to fly to Atlanta?” Shikya Harrison, a UCLA law student, said in a TikTok video. “I am one of the thousands – thousands – of Cobb County people who did not receive their absentee ballots.”

In Boston, Carolane Viktor had been ready to give Trump another chance after voting for him in 2016. But then, she said, he “started this whole chaos” by falsely saying Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Viktor, who immigrated to the United States from Haiti in 2005, said voting for Trump in the Haitian community had become an absolute “no-no.” Her grandmother joined her in voting for Harris.

Mario Salvador Gonzalez of Las Vegas was among more than 1 million Nevadans who voted early in person or by mail as of Friday. He’s also one of more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I think it would be nonpatriotic to not vote,” he said on his doorstep Sunday.

Civilian sleuths picking apart Jan. 6 footage dubbed Gonzalez “#CapitolFireDrill,” identifying him by his clothing as the person who allegedly sprayed a fire extinguisher toward police as they fought with rioters outside the Capitol.

He said he once believed the election was stolen from Trump but is no longer convinced of that. He doesn’t blame the former president for stoking the discontent. Courts and independent reviews have repeatedly found that the 2020 election was properly conducted. Dozens of lawsuits challenging the results failed.

Gonzalez, 52, a lifelong Republican, said he believes Trump is the right candidate for the economy, the handling of the southern border and American diplomacy, even if Trump is “rough around the edges on certain things.” He said he won’t participate in violence after Election Day and hopes no one else does, either.

“Whoever wins, we’ve got to accept it, embrace it and move forward,” Gonzalez said.