Battleground states rush to count ballots after mostly smooth Election Day vote

By Jeremy Herb, Tami Luhby and Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — Battleground states continued counting outstanding ballots into the early hours of Wednesday morning, with Donald Trump closing in on the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, after Election Day voting that largely went smoothly despite fake bomb threats that targeted multiple states.

Bomb threats were reported across five key battleground states, both to polling places and government offices where votes are counted. The threats were not credible, but they led temporary closures to precincts in several states on Tuesday. The FBI, which engaged with local and state officials, confirmed that some of the threats originated from Russian email domains.

US officials continue to say that at least some of the bomb threats made to polling locations in multiple states appeared to originate from Russian email domains. But the investigation is ongoing, and the FBI has yet to publicly confirm that someone in Russia was behind the threats.

Fulton County – a key Democratic-heavy county in Georgia – saw 32 threats on Tuesday, according to officials there.

Now that the polls have closed in all states, attention is focused squarely on tabulating the ballots – and where there are still outstanding votes to count. There are several states that have yet to be called in the presidential race.

While some sporadic issues popped up – long lines, isolated problems with machines, lawsuits and baseless claims of cheating – states reported a mostly straightforward Election Day.

Here’s where things stand with the key states:

Michigan

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said the Wolverine State is still on track to be the first presidential battleground state to report complete unofficial results, potentially overnight.

Benson said she expects a final delivery of about 4,000 Detroit ballots to arrive at the city’s counting center in “about an hour or so.” Those ballots will need to be processed and tabulated before the city can begin reporting results from that batch.

“That’s this sort of human aspect of this process. But the tabulation itself is mostly done,” she said.

Benson said that the state had a “successful” in-person early voting period as a result of Michigan’s new voting laws. This was the first general election in the state since the new measures went into effect allowing at least nine days of early voting and early tabulation of mail ballots.

A total of five locations across Michigan received bomb threats that were not deemed to be credible: four precincts and the secretary of state’s office in Lansing, per Benson.

Unlike some of the other states that also received similar threats, Benson said that Michigan did not see any disruptions of the voting process as a result of the threats. She emphasized that the election went smoothly in precincts across Michigan.

Georgia

CNN projected that Trump will win Georgia just after 12:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday.

A big chunk of the roughly 400,000 outstanding ballots in Georgia are in-person votes from metro Atlanta that were cast on Tuesday, Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer with the Georgia secretary of state’s office, told CNN.

There are also two batches of absentee ballots – including 10,400 ballots in Chatham County in the Savannah area – that still need to be sent in.

A total of 12 voting locations had their hours extended due to bomb threats, according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, as well as three additional polling locations due to “normal causes.”

Fulton County officials said it feels “amazing” to have the counting go so smoothly, particularly after the county grappled with 32 bomb threats on Tuesday.

Nevada

That last polls closed in Nevada after midnight ET thanks to long lines at polls.

Nevada officials are working on tallying in-person Election Day data as the last voter in the state cast a ballot at 12:45 a.m. ET, Clark County registrar Lorena Portillo told reporters. Authorities will “start processing mail ballots” in Clark County on Wednesday, she added.

“There were no major issues across the state” in the election process, said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar.

In the state, however, an issue with ballot signatures emerged among young voters – many of them do not know how to sign their name, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told CNN.

State officials are urgently reaching out to a large number of young voters to confirm their signatures so their votes can be counted. But officials say many teenagers and young adults in their 20s only know how to sign their names electronically.

“What we’re finding is there’s a lot of younger people who have a signature issue because they live in a digital world, they haven’t used a real signature in real life,” said Aguilar.

In Clark County, Nevada, more than 11,000 ballots still need verification.

Voters who need to cure ballots with signature issues have until November 12 to do so, according to state election rules.

The state saw multiple polling places with waits over an hour on Tuesday, including nine in Washoe County. In Nye County, a county clerk says the estimated line is 2.5 hours for at least one polling place.

Pennsylvania

CNN projected that Trump will win Pennsylvania, a key state for his path to the White House.

There are still votes outstanding in the state to be counted. Philadelphia received 202,713 mail-in ballots and another 437,427 votes have been cast at polling places as of 11:55 p.m. ET, city commissioner Omar Sabir said.

The city’s results are important because Vice President Kamala Harris will need a large pickup there to win Pennsylvania, where she trails Trump in the current count.

“We will continuously post updates. We will not stop until we have finished,” Sabir said in a news conference early Wednesday morning.

In Pennsylvania, Cambria County is conducting a hand-count of ballots that could not be scanned at the precinct earlier Tuesday due to a software issue, Secretary of State Al Schmidt said, adding that process can “take some time.”

The hand-count is typically done by “partisan teams of two” who work together, and the process would be open to observation by candidates and authorized representatives, he said.

Voting time in the county was extended after a “software malfunction” disrupted voters’ abilities to scan their ballots, the Office of County Commissioners said. The malfunction was caused by a printing error, Scott Hunt, the county’s top election official, told CNN earlier Tuesday, and new ballots are on their way to polling places. The ballots that were already cast but could not be read by the machine will be hand-counted, he said.

By contrast, the vast majority of votes – both in-person votes and mail-in ballots – in the second largest county in Pennsylvania will be counted by midnight, according to Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato.

“It’s been smooth sailing here in Allegheny County,” Innamorato told CNN, noting the turnout has been major. “The vibes are good when it comes to elections here in Allegheny County.”

Pennsylvania saw voting extended in several counties that saw bomb threats. A building that houses the Centre County Elections office in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, was temporary evacuated to investigate a threat received via email to the elections office.

Wisconsin

Milwaukee has finished processing about 75% of all absentee ballots as of about 10:45 p.m. ET, city election commission chair Paulina Gutierrez told reporters.

Polling places around the city have also reported the results from about 132,000 Election Day votes to Milwaukee County, with eight polling sites still sending results, she said.

“We’re still a couple hours away” from finishing the absentee count, Gutierrez said, predicting that the tally would wrap up sometime after midnight.

In Milwaukee, an error in setting up tabulator machines required a recount of about 30,000 ballots. The city redid all of those 30,000 ballots and has been progressing swiftly since then, city spokesperson Jeff Fleming said, while declining to share a specific estimate of when the count will wrap up.

Despite the swift recount, Republicans are already raising concerns about the snafu and demanding answers from Milwaukee.

Sen. Ron Johnson and Wisconsin GOP chair Brian Schimming visited the city’s central count as election observers and spoke with the city’s chief elections official.

Wearing a neon green “election observer” sticker and trailed by a bevy of reporters and Republican election observers, Johnson walked around the hangar-like counting center, looking at the machines and watching the vote count take place.

In an exchange that lasted several minutes, Johnson told Gutierrez to preserve all surveillance videos of the count and all records about the vote totals from the first tally of the roughly 30,000 ballots.

Arizona

As polls closed in Arizona Tuesday evening, hundreds of college students were still waiting in line to vote at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus fitness center, according to Alysa Horton, an ASU student and digital editor-in-chief at the university’s State Press newspaper. The line continued to grow in the final hour of voting.

“The line looks like students are determined to get their vote in and they’ll go to any extreme to stay in line,” Horton said. “I saw no one leave the line because of the wait.”

With many students opting to vote on Election Day in person, the line – which at one point consisted of roughly 300 people – extended for less than a quarter of a mile, Horton said.

State officials said they have “reason to believe” that the threats received in the state originated in Russia, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said Tuesday afternoon.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Sean Lyngaas, Dalia Faheid, Brian Todd, Zachary Cohen, Casey Tolan, Holmes Lybrand, Scott Glover, Pamela Brown, Jim Acosta and Laura Dolan contributed to this report.

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