According to the Kyunghyang Shinmun, the US Justice Department said in a statement on Tuesday that ensuring fair elections and protecting citizens’ voting rights are among its most important missions, and that it had placed 1,000 election monitors and observers across all 50 states. The department will also take voting-rights inquiries and complaints for one week starting that day. The federal monitoring force is about three times the size of the one in the 2022 midterms.

The same report analyzed that the Trump administration appears to be gathering examples of problems in the voting process in case it suffers a heavy defeat. That is the newspaper’s interpretation; the Justice Department said its purpose is to ensure fairness.

National Guard deployments and voting-machine glitches

According to a report by The Hill cited in the article, seven states have officially announced they will use the National Guard in this year’s midterms. At the proposal of Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson, Washington State is sending about 100 Guard members to seven counties to watch the election. The 2024 arson attack on a ballot box in Vancouver, which damaged hundreds of ballots, was cited as background, and the move was also read as a check on the federal government’s large monitoring deployment.

Equipment problems cropped up at polling places. According to Axios, some voting machines in Westchester County, New York, failed to read ballots, and voters were told to put them in separate envelopes. New York’s 17th District, which includes part of the county, is one of the biggest battlegrounds, held by Republican incumbent Mike Lawler. CNN reported that in Broward County, Florida, a ballot-scanning malfunction halted voting for about 20 minutes before staff switched to a manual system; there are no plans to extend voting hours.

Floods, tornadoes and a fraud-claim dispute

The weather was another variable. The East and West were mostly sunny, but parts of the south-central states and Florida were hit by flooding from heavy rain and by tornadoes. At least 18 polling places were changed in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and elsewhere, and 21 polling places were moved in Florida because of floods.

The New York Times noted that minor machine malfunctions occur in nearly every election and are usually resolved without serious trouble. Meanwhile, Katie Miller, the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, posted on X raising suspicions of election fraud, showing that the political sparring continued on voting day. Vote counts and turnout had not been confirmed at the time of writing.