Battleground states are rushing to count ballots after Election Day voting went largely smoothly

CNN
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Battleground states were counting the ballots that will decide the next U.S. president into the early hours of Wednesday morning after elections on Election Day went largely smoothly despite fake bomb threats against several states.

Bomb threats were reported in five key battleground states, both at polling stations and at government offices where votes are being counted. The threats were not credible, but led to temporary county closures in several states on Tuesday. The FBI, working with local and state officials, confirmed that some of the threats came from Russian email domains.

In Fulton County – a key Democratic county in Georgia – there were 32 threats on Tuesday, according to officials there.

With polls now closed in every state except Alaska, where polls close at 1 a.m. ET, all attention is focused on tallying the ballots — and where outstanding votes remain to be counted. There are several states that have not yet been nominated for the presidential race.

While some sporadic problems emerged — long lines, isolated machine problems, lawsuits and unfounded allegations of fraud — states reported a mostly straightforward Election Day.

Here is the current state of affairs with the most important states:

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

Benson said she expects Detroit's final shipment of about 4,000 ballots to arrive at the city's counting center in “about an hour.” These ballots must be processed and tabulated before the city can begin reporting the results of this batch.

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

Benson said the state has experienced a “successful” period of in-person early voting because of Michigan's new election laws. This was the first general election in the state since the new measures came into force, which required at least nine days of early voting and early processing of mail-in ballots.

According to Benson, a total of five locations across Michigan received bomb threats that were deemed unreliable: four counties and the Secretary of State's office in Lansing.

Unlike some other states that also received similar threats, Benson said Michigan has not experienced disruptions to the voting process due to the threats. She emphasized that elections went smoothly in precincts across Michigan.

CNN predicted that former President Donald Trump will win in Georgia shortly after 12:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

A large portion of the approximately 400,000 outstanding ballots in Georgia are in-person votes from the Atlanta metro area that were cast on Tuesday, Georgia Secretary of State Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling told CNN.

Additionally, two batches of mail-in ballots — including 10,400 ballots in Chatham County in the Savannah area — still need to be mailed in.

According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a total of twelve polling locations had their hours extended due to bomb threats, and three additional polling locations were extended for “normal reasons.”

Fulton County officials said it felt “amazing” that the count went so smoothly, especially after the county struggled with 32 bomb threats on Tuesday.

Polls in Nevada closed after midnight ET due to long lines at the polls.

According to a local county election official, the line to vote outside the University of Nevada, Reno Student Union remained about an hour long as of 11:15 p.m. ET.

Polls in the state closed at 10 p.m. ET. But when the first votes arrived in Nevada's largest county – Clark County – only 62 of 135 public polling places had officially closed their doors. Lines across Clark County and the state will delay reporting of any results, officials said.

In Nevada, there has been a problem with ballot signatures among young voters – many of whom don't know how to sign their names, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told CNN.

State officials are urgently reaching out to large numbers 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.

“We're finding that there are a lot of younger people who have a signature problem because they live in a digital world and haven't used a real signature in real life,” Aguilar said.

In Clark County, Nevada, more than 11,000 ballots remain to be verified.

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

There were several polling locations in the state with wait times of more than an hour on Tuesday, including nine in Washoe County. In Nye County, a county clerk says the estimated wait time for at least one polling place is 2.5 hours.

In Pennsylvania, Cambria County is conducting a hand count of ballots that could not be scanned due to a software glitch in the county early Tuesday, Secretary of State Al Schmidt said, adding that the process could “take some time.”

The hand count is typically conducted by “partisan teams of two” working together, and the process is open to observation by candidates and authorized representatives, he said.

The county's voting time was extended after a “software glitch” affected voters' ability to scan their ballots, the Office of County Commissioners said. The malfunction was caused by a printing error, Scott Hunt, the county's top elections official, told CNN early Tuesday, and new ballots were on their way to polling stations. Ballots that had already been cast but could not be read by the machine would be counted by hand, he said.

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

“It went smoothly here in Allegheny County,” Innamorato told CNN, noting that turnout was great. “The mood is good when it comes to elections here in Allegheny County.”

In Pennsylvania, voting expanded in several counties where bomb threats occurred. A building housing the Center County elections office in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, was temporarily evacuated to investigate a threat emailed to the elections office.

Milwaukee finished processing about 75% of all mail-in ballots around 10:45 p.m. ET, Paulina Gutierrez, chairwoman of the city's election commission, told reporters.

Polling places across the city have also reported the results of about 132,000 Election Day votes to Milwaukee County, with eight polling places still reporting results, she said.

“We are still a few hours away” from completing the absentee count, Gutierrez said, predicting the count would be completed sometime after midnight.

In Milwaukee, a mistake setting up tabulation machines required a recount of about 30,000 ballots. The city has reran all of those 30,000 ballots and has moved quickly since then, city spokesman Jeff Fleming said, but declined to provide a specific estimate of when the count will be completed.

Despite the quick recount, Republicans are already voicing concerns about the blunders and demanding answers from Milwaukee.

Senator Ron Johnson and Wisconsin GOP Chairman Brian Schimming visited the city's central voting district as election observers and spoke with the city's top elections official.

Johnson wore a neon green “Election Watcher” sticker and was accompanied by a crowd of reporters and Republican poll watchers. He walked through the hangar-like counting center, looking at the machines and watching the votes being counted.

In an exchange lasting several minutes, Johnson called on Gutierrez to preserve all surveillance videos of the count and all records of vote totals from the first count of the roughly 30,000 ballots.

When polls closed in Arizona on Tuesday night, hundreds of college students were still waiting in line to vote at Arizona State University's Tempe Campus Fitness Center, according to Alysa Horton, ASU student and digital editor of the university's State Press newspaper. The number continued to grow in the final voting hour.

“It looks like the students are determined to vote and they will do anything to stay in line,” Horton said. “I saw that no one left the line because of the wait.”

Because many students chose to vote in person on Election Day, the line — which at one point numbered about 300 people — stretched less than a quarter mile, Horton said.

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

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