2024 House, Senate elections live updates: Key races, analysis, polls close times

Authorities in the Denver area are investigating after election officials discovered “discrepancies” with signatures on several mail ballots sent from an adult day care facility in the city.

That’s according to Denver clerk and recorder Paul Lopez in a statement.

Election workers in Colorado check the signatures on mail ballots against voter signatures on file to make sure they’re submitted by the voter the ballot was sent to.

Lopez said his office notified law enforcement and the Denver district attorney’s office was investigating.

He also said law enforcement in nearby counties were also investigating but did not explain why.

Denver’s KMGH-TV, which first reported the investigation, said ballots from the facility were sent to six counties.

Colorado overwhelmingly votes by mail.

In Central Iowa’s Story County, home to about 100,000 people and the city of Ames, voting machines at some precincts malfunctioned, portending possible delays to reporting results.

“We are aware of technical issues regarding tabulators in some precincts in Story County,” said Ashley Hunt Esquivel, a spokesperson for Iowa Secretary of State’s Office.

“The auditor is working with the vendor and our office to resolve it. It is not stopping anyone from casting a single ballot. It may impact how quickly we can report results,” Esquivel said.

Story County Auditor Lucy Martin told the Des Moines Register that machines did not read “certain ballot styles” at about 12 of the county’s 45 polling locations.

Election workers would have to count ballots at those locations by hand, according to local Democratic and Republican Party officials.

The machines were tested and the cause of the technical difficulties was unknown, Martin added.

It’s now five consecutive presidential year election days that have been winners on Wall Street.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished at 42,221.88 on Tuesday, up 427.48 points from Monday’s close. That’s a 1% percent climb.

And history says it could have been predicted. Here’s what the Dow did on Election Day for the four most recent presidential races:

• Nov. 3, 2020 – Up 554.98, 2.1%
• Nov. 8, 2016 – Up 73.14, 0.4%
• Nov. 6, 2012 – Up 133.24, 1.0%
• Nov. 4, 2008 – Up 305.45, 3.28%

The last time there was a down day on Wall Street on Election Day during a presidential year was Nov. 2, 2004, and it was nominal.

In Richmond, Virginia, the local Electoral Board held an emergency meeting to remove a precinct chief.

Board Chair Starlet Stevens said in a telephone interview that 11 voters were given ballots that only had the presidential race and not local races.

Because they cast the ballots, they were unable to redo their votes with the correct ballots.

Stevens said the Board voted to remove the precinct chief not for the error but because the chief was being “disrespectful.”

The Board also received a complaint that the precinct chief refused to help a person who wanted to vote curbside, something that Virginia law allows for anyone 65 and older or physically disabled.

Coming around 6 p.m. Eastern: Kornacki Cam.

The super-popular NBC News National Political Correspondent Steve Kornacki will be part of a multiview experience put together by Peacock and is expected to last until around 2 a.m.

Also part of the multiview (basically, some of the same technology NBC utilized during the Paris Olympics) is a live stream of NBC News coverage and analysis, projected Electoral College results — and lots and lots of Kornacki, who’ll be at his big board to break down all the numbers.

“We’re caffeinating and hydrating him. We’re making sure he’s eating,” NBC’s Craig Melvin wrote on X. “@SteveKornacki, the national treasure, is rested and eager for his quadrennial Super Bowl.”

Officials in Northville, Michigan, closed a polling place at midday and sent voters to another precinct in the Detroit suburb because of a natural gas leak. Consumers Energy was investigating the leak.

Ballots sent to some polling locations in St. Clair County, Alabama, for Tuesday’s election were missing a state amendment and a local amendment, local probate judge Andrew Weathington said at a news conference Tuesday.

Judge Weathington said the first round of corrected ballots had been ordered from Birmingham and estimated they would arrive just before 2 p.m. CT.

“I’m as frustrated as anybody, and I understand that we have to take off work and all that stuff to go vote. And I apologize. I don’t know what else to say other than we’re very, very sorry,” Weathington said.

The local circuit court judge ordered polling locations across the country to stay open for two additional hours this evening, until 9 p.m. to accommodate the error. Weathington said ballots that had already been cast would still be counted. There are just over 95,000 residents in St. Clair County, according to the 2023 U.S. Census.

Officials warned residents to continue to expect long lines at polling locations.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said in an email that his office is aware of the delays and stressed that his office is not involved in inspecting and printing the ballots.

Tennessee voters will decide whether to reelect Republican U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn to a second term or choose Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson.

Tennessee hasn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide position in nearly two decades, but Johnson is hoping her recent meteoric rise to fame from nearly being expelled by state lawmakers last year will woo enough voters.

Blackburn has run a much more subdued campaign compared to six years ago, when an open seat forced a heated race between the Republican and former Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen. Blackburn has largely avoided Johnson throughout the campaign and declined to participate in any debates with the Democrat.

Johnson gained national attention when she joined fellow Democratic state Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones as they walked to the front of the House floor with a bullhorn while hundreds of gun control advocates flooded the Capitol to show their support for putting more restrictions on firearms. The demonstration took place just days after a school shooting that killed 6 people, including three young children, at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville.

▶ Read more about Tennessee’s Senate race

The FBI says bomb threats sent to polling locations in several states originate from Russian email domains and have been deemed non-credible.

The FBI did not identify the states in question, but Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said earlier Tuesday that the state’s election process had snuffed out some bomb threats he says came from Russia.

Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, said they got “multiple calls” and the threats forced a brief closure of two polling places.

The bomb threats were among multiple disturbances U.S. officials are tracking. But Cait Conley, a senior adviser to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters on a call Tuesday that there were no national-level security incidents that were threatening to disrupt the election on a wide scale.

Officials continue to warn of what they say is an unprecedented level of foreign influence and disinformation that they expect will persist beyond Election Day.

In the 2020 presidential election, Florida reported the results of more than 99% of ballots cast within a few hours of polls closing.

In California, almost one-third of ballots were uncounted after election night. The state was making almost daily updates to its count through Dec. 3, a full month after Election Day.

This wasn’t unusual or unexpected.

California, the nation’s most populous state, is consistently among the slowest to report all its election results. Florida, the third-most populous state, is generally among the first to finish.

The Constitution sets out broad principles for electing a national government and leaves the details to the states. The choices made by state lawmakers and election officials as they sort out those details affect everything from how voters cast a ballot, how quickly the tabulation and release of results takes place, how elections are kept secure and how officials maintain voters’ confidence in the process.

The gap between when California and Florida are able to finalize their count is the natural result of election officials in the two states choosing to emphasize different concerns and set different priorities.

▶ Read more about how the two states differ in their vote-counting systems

U.S. Capitol Police say the man was stopped Tuesday during a security screening at the Capitol Visitor Center. Authorities say he smelled of fuel and was carrying the flare gun and torch.

Officials have canceled public tours of the Capitol for the remainder of the day.

Police say they’re still investigating.

The arrest comes as authorities are on heightened alert for security issues around the nation’s capitol and have increased patrols in areas downtown and near the White House around Election Day. Nearly four years ago, a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

They take college football very seriously in Clemson, South Carolina.

But no, they did not take away Tigers coach Dabo Swinney’s right to vote just because his team lost to Louisville last week.

Let’s explain: Dabo Swinney’s given first name is William. Dabo Swinney went to vote on Tuesday. The state of South Carolina said William Swinney had already voted.

“I’m like, ‘Dang, they done voted me out of the state. Lost a game. … They done shipped me off,’” Swinney said.

Here was the issue: Dabo’s oldest son, also named William, voted last week. They counted William Jr. as William Sr., apparently. Hence, the confusion. Dabo Swinney got to submit a paper ballot and there will be a hearing Friday to get it all cleared up.

“It was quite an experience this morning,” the coach said. “Me and Will, our two votes will count on Friday.”

While it might take days to determine the balance of power in the House and Senate, some races will be called right as polls close.

How is that possible?

Race calls at poll closing time in uncontested or landslide races have been a routine part of election nights for decades. The Associated Press will consider multiple factors and analyze available data before determining whether a winner can be declared when polls close in a given state. But the AP will never declare the outcome in a competitive contest before enough votes are counted to make the winner clear.

Michigan voters are deciding between Democratic U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Republican former congressman Mike Rogers in a tight U.S. Senate battleground contest that could sway the balance of federal power.

Slotkin had a clear head start, but as Republicans became more confident about Donald Trump’s presidential prospects in Michigan, the contest drew more attention from funders who believed Rogers had a good chance of becoming the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat in the state in 30 years.

The race could determine whether Democrats continue to hold their slim majority in the Senate, where they’re defending more seats than Republicans in this election.

▶ Read more about Michigan’s Senate race

Election Day voting unfolded largely smoothly across the nation Tuesday but with scattered reports of extreme weather, ballot printing errors and technical problems causing delays.

Most of the hiccups occurring by mid-day were “largely expected routine and planned-for events,” said Cait Conley, senior adviser to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a news briefing. She said the agency wasn’t currently tracking any national, significant incidents affecting election security.

Helping voting run relatively smoothly on Election Day was the fact that tens of millions of Americans had already cast their ballots. Those included record numbers of voters in Georgia, North Carolina and other battleground states that could decide the winner of the presidential race.

▶ Read more about how Election Day is going so far

If you haven’t registered to vote, but you still hope to cast a ballot, don’t fret quite yet.

The District of Columbia and 21 states offer same-day registration, according to the Center for Election Innovation and Research. That means you can show up with the necessary documentation and register to vote and cast your ballot before the end of the day.

The following states and the District of Columbia offer same-day registration: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

A provisional ballot is used to ensure every registered voter can cast a ballot in an election. The unique kind of ballot is cast when there are questions about a voter’s registration status, whether they don’t have photo identification in a state that requires it, or, in some cases, if the voter made an error on their mail-in ballot. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 guarantees access to a provisional ballot.

According to MIT’s Election Lab, how exactly provisional ballots are handled varies from each state, but they’re segregated from traditionally cast ballots on Election Day so each ballot’s status can be determined. According to the Election Administration and Voting Survey compiled by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, roughly 700,000 provisional ballots were cast in federal elections in 2022, and around 550,000 were counted.

Last week, the United States Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal from Republicans that could have led to thousands of provisional ballots not being counted in Pennsylvania. The ruling will let voters cast a provisional ballot on Election Day if their mail-in ballot is to be rejected for a garden-variety error.

A man was arrested in upstate New York on Tuesday for threatening to burn down a polling site after he was told his registration wasn’t current, police said.

The man went to vote in the town of Fowler near the Canadian border around 6:30 a.m., New York State Police said in a news release.

The man, who had previously been convicted of a felony, was told he was ineligible to vote because he had not re-registered after being released from prison.

The man became irate and began threatening to return with a gun or to burn the place down, police said.

The man fled but was later picked up by state police and brought to the station for questioning. Charges against him were pending.

In a new video posted early Election Day, Beyoncé cosplays as Pamela Anderson in the television program “Baywatch” — red one-piece swimsuit and all — and asks viewers to vote.

In the two-and-a-half minute clip, set to most of “Bodyguard,” a cut from her 2024 country album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé channels the blonde bombshell before concluding with a simple message, written in white text: “Happy Beylloween,” followed by “Vote.”

At a rally for Donald Trump in Pittsburgh on Monday night, the former president spoke dismissively about Beyoncé’s appearance at a Kamala Harris rally in Houston last month, drawing boos for the megastar from his supporters.

“Beyoncé would come in. Everyone’s expecting a couple of songs. There were no songs. There was no happiness,” Trump said.

She did not perform — unlike in 2016, when she performed at a presidential campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland — but she endorsed the vice president and gave a moving speech.

“I’m not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said. “A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided.”

The Harris campaign has taken on Beyonce’s track “Freedom,” a cut from her landmark 2016 album “Lemonade,” as its anthem.

Alaska voters are deciding Tuesday a hard-fought race for the state’s only U.S. House seat that could help decide control of that chamber. They’re also choosing whether to repeal the state’s system of open primaries and ranked choice general elections just four years after opting to give that system a go.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola sought to fend off GOP efforts to wrest back the seat held for 49 years by Republican Rep. Don Young, who died in 2022. Peltola’s main challenger was Republican Nick Begich, who’s from a family of prominent Democrats and was among the opponents she defeated in special and regular elections two years ago when Peltola, who is Yup’ik, became the first Alaska Native elected to Congress.

▶ Read more about Alaska’s House race

As news outlets get ready for election night, they’re not only focusing on what happens. They’re keeping watch over what doesn’t.

Several plans to combat misinformation are in place across newsrooms that will follow the climax of a hard-fought campaign. The Associated Press and others will take special steps to explain what they do. The New York Times is assigning reporters to comb the Internet for the first sign of new conspiracies. An NPR reporter will look for mischief created by artificial intelligence. ABC News has tried “pre-bunks” to prepare its viewers.

False stories that infected the political debate after Hurricane Helene this fall were a sobering reminder of how quickly things can spread.

Other organizations are making similar promises, including making clear to people when it’s too soon for conclusions to be drawn. “My mantra on election night is radical transparency,” said Rick Klein, ABC News Washington bureau chief.

▶ Read more about how news outlets are preparing to combat potential misinformation on Election Day

A Pennsylvania state judge on Tuesday ordered polls to remain open for two extra hours in Cambria County, which sought the extension after a software malfunction affected ballot scanning machines.

County officials say the problem caused voter confusion, with some people leaving without casting a ballot, as well as long lines at some locations. They stressed, though, that no one was being turned away from the polls and all ballots would be counted, as did state officials.

From student creations in Michigan to a Colts-themed design in Indianapolis to the iconic “I’m a Georgia voter” peach, voters around the country are collecting status stickers.

▶ Read more on how the “I Voted” stickers have branched out beyond the standard flag design.

In Arizona, puppies are hitting the polls on Election Day.

Joe Casados of the Arizona Humane Society went to the polls with Daphne, a 10-week-old puppy available for adoption.

“We know that voting can be a stressful time for a lot of people. We also want to celebrate everyone doing their civic duty and coming out to vote,” Casados said. “So, we thought what better way than bringing some puppies out to the polls to give someone a little reward and a little serotonin boost just for coming out today and voting.”

Casados said voters thanked them for bringing the puppies.

“I think everyone is very excited whenever they get a chance to see a puppy,” Casados said.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is hoping to brush back a challenge from Republican John Deaton on Tuesday as she seeks a third term representing Massachusetts.

Deaton, an attorney who moved to the state from Rhode Island earlier this year, tried to portray the former Harvard Law School professor as out of touch with ordinary Bay State residents.

Warren cast herself as a champion for an embattled middle class and a critic of regulations benefitting the wealthy. Warren has remained popular in the state despite coming in third in Massachusetts in her 2020 bid for president.

Warren first burst onto the national scene during the 2008 financial crisis with calls for tougher consumer safeguards, resulting in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has gone on to become one of her party’s most prominent liberal voices.

▶ Read more about the Massachusetts Senate race

The wait for a House majority will likely extend well beyond the night of the election.

Neither party is expecting to sweep convincingly to House control, meaning that just a handful of seats anywhere in the country could tilt the balance of power. With many of those races on the West Coast, results won’t even start filtering in until late on election night.

California, the nation’s most populous state, is consistently among the slowest to report all its election results. It will likely take days and possibly weeks to know who won in some districts.

Cait Conley, senior adviser to the director of the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, said during a briefing that “we are not currently tracking any national level, significant incidents impacting the security of our election infrastructure. We are tracking instances of extreme weather and other temporary infrastructure disruption to certain areas of the country, but these are largely expected routine and planned for events.”

Conley said CISA, the FBI and intelligence communities did anticipate that foreign actors would try to influence the election later today and in the following weeks.

It’s usually possible to determine who won an election before the vote counting is 100% complete. But doing so requires determining how many ballots still need to be tabulated at any point in the vote count, and that’s not as straightforward or clear-cut as you might imagine.

In fact, it’s only gotten more complicated as elections have evolved, making traditional methods of tracking vote count progress less reliable.

For years, the most common way news organizations kept track of the progress in the vote count on election night was to calculate the percentage of precincts that had reported their results. But over the years, that method has become a less and less reliable measurement that does not reflect the realities of modern elections.

The main challenge is that it can take a while for the people running elections to figure out exactly how many people voted in any given election. It often takes local and state officials weeks to arrive at the final, official number.

That’s in part because of mail voting. A local elections office might know exactly how many mail ballots they sent out to voters and have a good estimate of how many have been returned in the days leading up to Election Day. In fact, before officials begin counting votes, it’s often easier to know the approximate number of mail ballots cast than the number of people who turned up on Election Day.

▶ Read more about how and why AP uses expected vote instead of “precincts reporting”

An Alabama county is having emergency ballots printed after discovering that many ballots were missing the back page which contains proposed constitutional amendments.

St. Clair County Probate Judge Andrew Weathington said the problem was discovered Tuesday morning when packs of sealed ballots were opened at polling places. He said it appeared to be a printing error. The proposed ballots were proofed before printing and were correct, he said. He said emergency ballots are being reprinted. The Alabama Secretary of State’s Office confirmed emergency ballots are being printed.

The ACLU of Alabama has asked the St. Clair probate office to extend voting hours by the number of hours it takes to get new ballots, a spokesman for the organization said. Weathington said he’s seeking legal guidance from the Alabama secretary of state and the county attorney.

Alabama voters are deciding local constitutional amendments and one statewide amendment. The statewide amendment relates to allowing a local school board to sell land, located in another Alabama county, to a developer. Voters in the county were also voting on a local amendment related to local school board governance.

The county’s congressional representative, Rep. Mike Rogers, is unoppsed in this election.

Although it serves a similar purpose, AP VoteCast is not an exit poll.

Traditional exit polls, including the one conducted by a consortium of news networks in the United States, rely largely on in-person interviews with voters conducted outside of select polling places after they’ve voted, supplemented with a phone survey to reach mail-in voters. Before AP VoteCast the AP worked with other major news organizations to conduct Election Day exit polls.

AP VoteCast was created in part to reflect significant changes over the years in how people vote, from a world where most people vote by showing up at the polls on Election Day to one where a growing number vote before Election Day.

AP VoteCast captures the views of voters — whether they vote in person on Election Day or weeks ahead of time — by beginning to interview registered voters several days before Election Day. Those interviews conclude as polls close in each state. Interviews are offered in English and Spanish, as needed.

This approach allowed AP VoteCast to reliably survey more than 130,000 registered voters in all 50 states during the 2020 presidential election, and comprehensively explain how Democrat Joe Biden won the presidential election.

▶ Read more about AP VoteCast and how it works

Florida voters turning to a state-run website to check their voter registration status were getting an error message Tuesday morning. A spokesperson for Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd confirmed the state’s online Voter Information Lookup tool was experiencing technical issues but didn’t answer questions about what was causing the problem.

“We’re working to resolve it,” spokesperson Mark Ard said. “We’re providing alternative websites and locations for voters to find their voter information, their precinct.”

Floridians can check their voter registration status and find their polling place by going to their county supervisor of elections website.

South Carolina Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace is trying to cement her hold on her seat in a state that doesn’t mind sending people back to Congress for decades.

There have been questions over whether Mace’s attention-seeking personality and brashness and willingness to buck her party’s establishment could be a liability. But so far, she’s been embraced by her coastal 1st District.

Mace flipped the seat back to Republicans in 2020 after a stunning upset of incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham. She fought off a GOP challenger endorsed by former President Donald Trump in 2022 and breezed to a surprisingly easy win — this time with Trump’s backing — in the 2024 Republican primary without a runoff.

Her fellow Republicans in the South Carolina General Assembly also did her a favor by redrawing the district and sending traditional Democratic precincts in and around downtown Charleston to the state’s only majority-minority district. Under the old map in 2020, Mace won less than 51% of the vote. With the new maps in 2022 she received more than 56%.

Mace’s Democratic challenger as voting ends Tuesday is businessman and former International African American Museum CEO Michael Moore. His campaign has struggled to gain momentum and Mace has barely acknowledged he’s in the race.

▶ Read more about the South Carolina House race

There are no NFL or NBA games today. But plenty of fans will be going to stadiums anyway.

At least 17 NFL and NBA facilities are either polling locations or ballot drop-off stations. Some teams even offered voters personalized “I Voted” stickers with team logos.

Tuesdays aren’t game days in the NFL.

The NBA, for the third consecutive year, isn’t playing any games on Election Day to support “civic engagement,” the league said. And players from all 30 NBA teams wore warm-up shirts with a simple message Monday night: “Vote,” they said.

One question will be asked over and over on election night: Who won?

The Associated Press will answer that question for nearly 5,000 contested races across the United States and up and down the ballot, from president and state ballot measures to a variety of local offices.

The AP has compiled vote results and declared winners in elections for more than 170 years, filling what could otherwise be a critical information void of up to a month between Election Day and the official certification of results.

What goes into determining the winners? A careful and thorough analysis of the latest available vote tallies and a variety of other election data, with the ultimate goal of answering this question: Is there any circumstance in which the trailing candidate can catch up? If the answer is no, then the leading candidate has won.

▶ Read more about how AP calls races

Flooding has knocked out power to one Missouri polling site, made another one hard to reach and closed dozens of roads in the state.

More than 7 inches (18 centimeters) of rain have fallen in some areas over the past two days. And the National Weather Service issued flood and flash flood warnings and watches across a large swath of the state, extending from its southwest corner to the St. Louis area in the east.

It’s so bad that some drivers were stranded in their vehicles and bus service was disrupted on multiple routes in the St. Louis area.

In Jefferson County, just to the south of St. Louis, the sheriff’s office warned in a news release that one polling site is not accessible by many people because of flooding.

And in St. Louis County, the weather caused electrical equipment to flood in one suburb, knocking out power to a church that’s serving as a polling place, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Poll workers there are now running the elections using a generator.

Despite the problems, many voters lined up in the rain to cast their ballots.

So you want to cast a ballot on Election Day? Or maybe vote by mail? It helps to know the rules.

The federal government sets some basic standards: U.S. citizens age 18 or older are eligible to vote. But each state can adopt additional voting requirements and restrictions. For example, many states disqualify voters serving a prison sentence for felony crimes.

Many states also require people to register to vote in advance of Election Day, so poll workers can check names off a list when people show up to vote. The majority of states also ask voters to show some form of identification, so carrying an ID may be important.

▶ Read more about some of the most common rules and requirements for casting a ballot

Republicans are poised to flip West Virginia this year, giving them an important boost in their bid to take control of the narrowly divided Senate.

The rest of the Senate election map has also given Democrats plenty of anxiety. The party is defending seats in seven battleground states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Montana, Arizona and Nevada. If Republicans flip any of those — while winning West Virginia and holding their current Senate seats — they’ll win a majority.

Still, Democrats think they have an outside chance of beating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas. Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer, a Republican, has also faced a surprisingly tough reelection race against an independent candidate, Dan Osborn.

The biggest states to watch in the razor-tight race for House control have been more or less afterthoughts in the presidential campaign. But between New York and California, there are well over a dozen races that could sway control of the House.

A group of New York Republicans has been crucial to their party’s razor-thin majority in the House, but it will be a challenge for the party to hold onto all those seats in districts that extend into New York City’s suburbs.

Then on the West Coast, there are nearly a dozen House elections, from southern California all the way up to Washington, that have been competitive.

Keep in mind there are also tossup races all over the map. The House majority will likely be decided by just a few seats, meaning high-stakes elections in states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado and Arizona.

Democrats would take up Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic priorities if she wins and they gain control of Congress, including tax breaks for families with children and middle-class workers. They’re also focused on driving down the cost of housing, potentially through grants for first-time homebuyers.

Another top priority for Democrats is restoring nationwide abortion rights. Harris is also promising to revive a border security bill that was produced through a bipartisan Senate negotiation but rejected by Donald Trump.

Throughout the campaign season, congressional Democrats have largely kept quiet about the specifics of a policy agenda, instead focusing on winning an election they cast as a make-or-break moment for American democracy.

Congressional Republicans have already been looking for ways to extend the tax cuts passed during Donald Trump’s first term as president and will expire at the end of 2025. They’ve also been looking at ways to finish building a barrier along the border with Mexico.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he wants to take a “blow torch” to federal regulations in implementing an ambitious conservative agenda.

Those priorities become much harder if Republicans fail to sweep into power.

A news clip that purports to come from the FBI tells voters they should vote remotely because of a high terror threat at polling stations.

But the FBI says that the clip is bogus, did not come from the bureau and doesn’t accurately represent concerns about safety at polling locations.

Also false is a video depicting a fabricated FBI press release claiming the management of prisons in several key battleground states rigged inmate voting and colluded with one of the political parties.

The FBI did not identify anyone who it thought might be responsible for the manufactured videos. Over the past two weeks, the agency has blamed Russian influence actors for a variety of manufactured internet postings and videos officials say were released as part of a broader disinformation campaign.

In a critical election year, Democrats are looking to flip a once reliably Republican Louisiana congressional seat, where political boundaries were recently redrawn to form the state’s second mostly Black congressional district.

With five people on the ballot for Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District, Democrats have thrown their support behind longtime politician Cleo Fields, 61. The state senator has been involved in state politics for three decades and served two terms in Congress after being elected in 1992.

Across the aisle, Republicans are looking to preserve the seat, especially in an election year where the GOP is trying to hold on to their majority in the U.S. House. The only Republican on the ballot is former state lawmaker Elbert Guillory, 80.

For nearly 50 years, only one Democrat has won the seat in Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District. But the district’s boundaries have recently been recrafted.

▶ Read more about Louisiana’s House race

The U.S. Postal Service is open as usual on Election Day, but before voters drop their ballots in they should check their state’s deadlines.

Some states require mail-in ballot to arrive by Election Day. Others only require ballots to be postmarked by Election Day. And some states, too, allow mail-in ballots to be dropped off in ballot boxes or at polling places through Election Day.

Voters should check their state election websites to determine the deadlines.