Polls stay open late at sites in Pennsylvania, North Carolina; Toledo site reopens after bomb threat evacuation

As of 5:21 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Nov. 3, a Pennsylvania court and North Carolina's elections board had extended voting at a few sites, and a Toledo, Ohio, site had reopened after a bomb threat evacuation. This account is not a complete survey of the states and omits Florida.

Extended hours

• Pennsylvania: The Chester County Court of Common Pleas gave three precincts 30 more minutes, until 8:30 p.m., the county said: Easttown Township Library in Berwyn, St. John's Presbyterian Church in Devon and Goshen Baptist Church in West Chester. Votes cast after 8 p.m. “will utilize provisional ballots.”¹ The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “machine set-up issues” delayed the openings.²
• North Carolina: The State Board of Elections extended voting up to 45 minutes at five sites in Hertford, Wilson, Lenoir and Columbus counties that opened late because of computer and printer problems, WFAE reported. State results will wait until at least 8:15 p.m.³ WCTI reported that South Williams-Tabor City Courthouse in Columbus County stays open until 8:15 p.m.; lengths elsewhere were not given.⁴
• Georgia: The secretary of state's office said a safety drill delayed voting seven minutes at Rockbridge Elementary School in Gwinnett County and officials would ask a judge for seven more, WSB Radio reported.⁵

Toledo

Beverly Elementary School, a Toledo polling site, received a phoned bomb threat about 10:30 a.m., a Toledo Public Schools spokesperson told USA Today.⁶ Lucas County Board of Elections Deputy Director Tim Monaco put the closure at one hour and 15 minutes, The Mercer County Outlook reported. Voting resumed shortly after noon after a police sweep found nothing.⁷

Other northwest Ohio schools received threats and were found safe; as of early afternoon, officials had not said who made the threats, The Outlook reported.⁷

New York scanners

Scanners across Westchester County did not accept ballots. Ballots went into “orange emergency ballot bags,” the county board said, WNBC reported.⁸ The board later linked the failure to “an update to the county's election programming,” USA Today reported.⁶

False information

• Connecticut: The secretary of the state's office said “misinformation” posted “by the FBI's New Haven office” gave Wednesday as Election Day.⁹
• Tennessee: The secretary of state's office said texts listing other closing times are wrong, WSMV reported.¹⁰

Federal monitors

The Justice Department said it is sending about 1,000 monitors and observers to all 50 states and listed the places. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon called it “the largest monitoring effort in DOJ history.”¹¹

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Monday, Nov. 2, denied without prejudice a temporary restraining order sought by the NAACP and three individuals, who allege a violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act. He ordered the department to comply with its counsel's concession that monitors are “administrative or clerical personnel and not law enforcement officials,” will wear no uniforms or federal insignia, carry no firearms and have no arrest power. The order does not count Bureau of Prisons staff with limited arrest authority as law enforcement officers.¹²

The department's Nov. 3 status report says it removed “several sworn law enforcement officers” from the volunteer pool after consulting the ATF and U.S. Marshals Service. It says using Bureau of Prisons employees “will not create a risk of an arrest at a polling location.”¹³

What the records do not show

• The Ohio secretary of state's site would not open. Reports differ on whether a second call went to Beverly.⁷
• We did not open the Chester County order or a North Carolina board record; WCTI and WFAE appear to differ on the number of Wilson County sites.
• We could not confirm a ruling on the Georgia request.
• We found no FBI reply on the New Haven post and no FBI or Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency statement on Tuesday's threats.