AILSA CHANG, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Ailsa Chang.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
And I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It is Election Day, and turnout could be on pace to break records for a midterm year. NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks has been following all the twists and turns leading up to today, and he is here with me now. Hey, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey there.
KELLY: Hey. So how are things going so far?
PARKS: Pretty smoothly, overall. I mean, that said, Mary Louise, federal election involves tens of thousands of human beings exchanging and marking hundreds of millions of pieces of paper. So there are always issues somewhere, right? We're seeing some polling places closed in Florida due to flooding. Someone pulled a fire alarm at the campus of the University of Texas at a polling location there that led to a brief evacuation.
The highest-profile issue we've seen seems to be in Westchester County, New York, which includes part of one of the nation's toss-up congressional districts. As soon as polls opened there, it became clear there was an issue with the ballot scanners. It's basically taken all day to get it sorted out. In the meantime, people have been filling out their ballots and giving them to election workers, basically, for those workers to hold onto them until the ballot scanners get up and running again.
KELLY: And then they can get scanned. OK. Now, as we know, President Trump, President Trump's allies have seized on things just like this to say we can't trust the elections. Is that happening today?
PARKS: Totally. I mean, this is kind of out of a movie, if you are going to write one about sort of election fraud narratives. You know, the ballot scanners go down. People are putting ballots into emergency ballot bags. And we saw a lot of people in President Trump's orbit posting things like that online. Katie Miller, who's a conservative podcast host, and the wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, posted online that this is how the left steals elections.
It's worth noting that in New York, all the ballots that are turned in today are being monitored by bipartisan groups of election workers, and the candidates in that congressional race so far have echoed the messaging of the voting officials saying, still go out to vote. Your votes will be counted.
KELLY: OK. So just for the record, so far this election, everything is proceeding more or less as you would have expected. Okey dokey. A lot of people did vote early this cycle. Do we have numbers yet on that?
PARKS: Yes. More than 60 million people voted early, either by mail or early in person, which is 15 million more than in 2022, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab. And it's a big reason why a lot of election officials are thinking this might be the highest midterm election ever. I mean, it's really striking when you actually zoom in on some of the swing states, as well. In Texas, there was a 41% increase from 2022, in terms of early voting turnout. In Michigan, it was a 26% increase. In Iowa and Maine, it was 25%.
KELLY: Let's go to counting votes. In some places, they count fast. We're going to get results almost immediately. In other places, it could take a while. Why?
PARKS: So first off, it's important to understand that when we're talking about knowing the winners right after polls close, we're talking about news organizations actually calling races for one candidate or the other. We at NPR rely on the Associated Press - excuse me - to make those sort of race calls. But the actual process of election officials counting votes, certifying elections - that takes weeks in every single state across the country.
So then when we talk about how long it takes for the media organizations to call those races, that comes down to margin of victory. If a race is really close, then the journalists at those news organizations need to see more results come in before they can decide that they can confidently name a winner. Which is why the places that actually take the longest are places that are close elections and that count slowly. Two places that come to mind for me - California and Alaska - places with close congressional districts that also have a lot of vote-by-mail ballots.
KELLY: And just quickly, Miles, California and Alaska - also two places where we have seen the Justice Department target unprecedented election litigation. Where does that stand?
PARKS: So no one really knows what to expect from the Justice Department or the Trump administration in the next couple days. I will say if today's midterms come down to just one or two races in the House or Senate in places that are taking a while to count, that is where experts who I talked to say they start to get worried about efforts to either interfere in the counting or the certification.
KELLY: NPR's Miles Parks. Thanks.
PARKS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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