Midterm elections 2022: US voters head to polls as Republicans fight to take Senate control – live

Here’s some helpful context for Tuesday’s midterm elections and what it could mean for Democrats’ control of Congress, from the Guardian’s Chris McGreal and Joan E Greve

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The Biden administration was braced for a bad night on Tuesday as the US midterm election results threatened to rob the Democrats of control of Congress, just as former president Donald Trump appears ready to announce another run for the White House.

But the Democrats were holding out hope that they might just retain control of the US Senate if a handful of closely fought races fell their way.

The final results, which will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Biden’s first term as president and further constrain his legislative agenda, could take days or even weeks in some closely fought Senate races. Delayed results are likely to fuel legal challenges and conspiracy theories about vote-rigging, particularly if the remaining seats determine control of the Senate.

The ground was already being laid in Pennsylvania, where a close US Senate race is being fought between Mehmet Oz, a Trump-backed Republican, and Democrat John Fetterman, who has been battling to assure voters he is fit for office after a stroke. Earlier on election day on Tuesday, the agency overseeing the voting in Philadelphia said it will delay counting thousands of paper ballots because of a Republican lawsuit that said the process was open to duplicate voting.

Dozens of Republican candidates for the Senate, the House of Representatives and other major offices have refused to confirm that they will accept the result if they lose amid a swirl of false claims of fraud, stemming from Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and kept alive by the Republican party leadership.

Read the full article here.

More reporting on Californians voting on Proposition 30, from the Guardian’s Maanvi Singh

Californians are voting today on a ballot measure that would tax the state’s richest residents in an effort to get more electric vehicles on the road.

The measure, Proposition 30, would hike taxes by 1.75% on those earning $2m or more annually to raise between $3bn and $5bn annually to subsidize households, businesses and schools; buy zero-emission cars, trucks and buses; fund infrastructure to charge electric vehicles; and bolster wildfire prevention efforts.

Proponents of the measure, including the coalition of environmental and labor groups that developed it, say the tax would provide urgently needed funds to hasten the transition to zero-emission vehicles, and reduce the disproportionate burden of pollution on low-income, minority communities across the state.

Detractors, including the California governor, Gavin Newsom, claim the proposal is a corporate carve-out for Lyft, the ride-hailing company that has backed the measure and helped fund its campaign.

Read more about Proposition 30 and the fraught battle over it here:

The latest on Los Angeles’ mayoral race, from the Guardian’s Lois Beckett

By the time Los Angeles residents headed to polls on Tuesday, mayoral hopeful and billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso had poured more than $100m of his own fortune into his campaign to become the city’s next leader.

Caruso, who’s battling Congresswoman Karen Bass in a closely contested race, has backed his own campaign with $101m as of late last week, campaign ethics filing show, outspending his opponent by more than 10 to one.

The developer, who is running a pro-police, tough-on-crime campaign, came in second to Bass, a former community organizer and leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, in the city’s June primary.

But Bass’ strong lead over Caruso in recent weeks evaporated, according to a recent poll of likely voters, with her 45% to 41% lead over Caruso within the poll’s margin of error.

Caruso, who has an estimated net worth of $5.3bn, is nearing a mayoral campaign record set by billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who spent $109m of his own money to win his third term as mayor of New York City in 2009.

Total political spending of more than $120m on a mayoral race is a striking sum, especially for a contest in which the key issue is LA’s homelessness. There are at least 41,000 unhoused people in Los Angeles county, many of them unsheltered, and living, in tents, cars, RVs and makeshift structures.

Bass has repeatedly attacked Caruso’s campaign spending, saying that if she had $90m or $100m to spend, she would spend it on affordable housing.

Concerns over the spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms are a recurring theme of each election but with the recent mass layoffs at Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform civil liberties groups are particularly on high alert.

The company laid off a reported 50% of the workforce or an estimated 3,700 workers last week just days before the midterms. Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth said that layoffs affected 15% of the company’s trust and safety team which is charged with moderating content including combating misinformation. That has the leaders of civil liberties groups such as Color of Change, Free Press and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who met with Musk to discuss how Twitter will deal with hate speech, convinced that the company will not be sufficiently staffed to handle attempts to mislead voters today.

“Retaining and enforcing election-integrity measures requires an investment in the human expert staff, factcheckers, and moderators, who are being shown the door today,” said Jessica J González, co-CEO of Free Press.

While it’s still early in the day, months-old viral videos and tweets falsely claiming Republicans were being barred from the polls have already been recirculated today, according to the Washington Post.

Pennsylvania is at the heart of the battle for control of Congress and key governorships across the country. To get a sense of Democrats’ political fortunes in this consequential battleground, I spoke to Ed Rendell, a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.

Rendell is bullish on the governor’s race, where Democrat Josh Shapiro has maintained a consistent lead over his Republican opponent, the election-denying conservative Doug Mastriano. But he has jitters about the Senate race between John Fetterman, the Democrat, and Mehmet Oz, the Republican, which is rated a toss up.

Key to the race, he says, is Black voter turnout in cities like Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. If Democrats fail to mobilize this crucial constituency, it will be hard, if not impossible, for them to eke out a win in a close contest.

Rendell is hopeful Obama’s visit to the state on Saturday will have a “dramatic impact” on turnout, especially among Black voters, by reminding voters of the stakes and making the affirmative case for electing Democrats.

And he does not believe, as some in his party do, that Biden’s campaign appearance in Philadelphia on Saturday, alongside Obama, Fetterman and Shapiro, will hurt the Democratic ticket,

In fact, he said it’s possible that the enduring affection for Biden in places like Scranton, where the president was born, may help boost support for Democrats in that industrial corner of the state.

“If you don’t like Joe Biden and you want to send him a message … you vote against him, but not because he appears with Fetterman,” Rendell said. “That doesn’t change anybody’s mind.”

The Guardian’s Abené Clayton, reporting on voting conditions from Los Angeles

A winter storm has brought days of rain, snow and flood warnings to southern and northern California, and while it may have ended California’s fire season it also has led midterm election hopefuls to implore voters to defy the conditions to cast their ballots.

There are more questions than clear answers around the impact that weather has on voter turnout and ultimately the results of an election, but candidates aren’t leaving anything up to chance or people’s instincts to stay dry, warm and off of wet roads.

“Since we don’t like rain, I have to make sure that people vote. We can’t lose this election because of the rain. That would be crazy,” Karen Bass, the progressive candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, said during a pre-election day Instagram live interview with the actor Rosario Dawson.

On the other side of the state, Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s interim district attorney who is running to retain her seat, is calling on people to come out to the polls, “rain or shine”.

Matt Gunderson, a Southern California state senate candidate whose campaign promises include repealing laws that downgrades crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

Donald Trump, who lost Arizona in 2020, has weighed in on the tabulation machine issues in Maricopa county.

Trump posted on Truth Social, saying the machine problems were mostly affecting conservative or Republican areas. It’s not clear exactly which sites have been experiencing the tabulation problems, but voters around the county have reported them.

“Can this possibly be true when a vast majority of Republicans waited for today to Vote? Here we go again? The people will not stand for it!!!” Trump wrote.

Earlier on Tuesday, election officials in Maricopa County reported that about 20% of polling places in the county were experiencing problems.

The Guardian’s Erum Salam reports on the voting situation in Texas

Things are heating up in Texas, one of the most difficult states to cast a vote. Reports have emerged of voters being turned away from eight polling sites in Bell county, an area north-east of Austin, after check-in machines malfunctioned because of an issue relating to the time change.

Bell county election officials requested an additional hour for voting from the Texas secretary of state due to the issues.

At a time when doubt is being unnecessarily cast on the integrity of the American electoral process, Bell county does not inspire confidence in those already skeptical, but county officials told the Guardian that the issue with the machines only affected voters’ ability to check in, not their ability to vote.

Bell county’s public information officer, James Stafford, said: “For some reason, computers at those eight locations did not automatically update to the new time. As a result, the central computer, recognizing a discrepancy, would not allow those devices to come online, and we were unable to open those sites to voters.

The critical issue that we want to communicate is that we have not had any issues related to ballots or tabulation machines. The issue was limited to those check-in devices. I also would say that, seeing the work and the passion of both our elections and technology services staff as they worked diligently to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible.”

Confidence in the electoral process is integral to the preservation of democracy and boosting that confidence has been the primary objective of some. The US Department of Justice announced yesterday it will send federal monitors to polling sites across the country, including three counties in Texas, to ensure smooth sailing on election day.

During early voting, the Beaumont chapter of the NAACP alleged Black voters were being harassed and intimidated by election workers in Jefferson county. Jessica Daye, a local voter, alleged she witnessed other Black voters being shadowed by election workers who demanded they say their addresses out loud, despite already being checked in to vote.

On Monday, Daye, the NAACP and The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a lawsuit and a federal judge issued an order prohibiting the discriminatory behavior.

On the morning of election day, the Election Protection coalition – the nation’s oldest and largest non-partisan voter protection coalition – held a virtual press conference “outlining resources and guidance available to voters in need of information or facing intimidation at the polls”.

On the call were leaders from the Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Texas Civil Rights Project, and top of the agenda was addressing any voting incidents at polling sites or ballot drop boxes in key states across the country.

Lawyers’ Committee For Civil Rights Under Law called the incident in Beaumont “a gross instance of invasion of privacy and voter intimidation”.

In the call, the Texas Civil Rights Project said it received more reports of machine malfunctions, voter intimidation, polling sites opening late, poll workers dressed in partisan attire in a few places, and issues with mail ballots that were either not received or rejected.

Voting in Texas ends at 7pm central.

As millions across the country voted on Tuesday, Joe Biden tweeted an encouragement for people to participate in elections.

Behind the scenes, Biden also spoke with a number of key leaders in the Democratic party.

From the White house press office:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This afternoon, the President spoke individually by phone with Democratic Governors Association Chair Roy Cooper, DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney, DSCC Chair Gary Peters, and DNC Senior Advisor Cedric Richmond. He also spoke jointly to DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Carlisa Johnson reports on Joy to the Polls, an arts-based voting initiative in Georgia

In Georgia, young voters make up 17% of the state’s voting population. However, young voter turnout remained lower than in previous elections at the end of early voting. Now, the final get out the vote efforts are happening to capture young voters.

Throughout the state, voting rights organizers are taking to the streets to help voters get to the polls, cast their votes and have their voices heard. Today, Joy to the Polls, an arts-based initiative, is making eight stops throughout the metro area to encourage voters to head to the polls and celebrate the joy of voting.

At its third stop of the day, Joy to the Polls featured a performance by recording artist Tate “Baby Tate” Farris in East Atlanta. Farris, a Georgia native, said she came out to remind young people to vote. “Young people have power. This is the opportunity to take that power that [they] have and use it by being active in the election process.”

This initiative, which originated in 2020, creates party-like atmospheres at polling places throughout the state, hoping to ease the stress of the voting process. Kaelyn Kastle, co-host of the East Atlanta stop, believes events like Joy to the Polls are critical in places like Georgia, where elections are won by thin margins. “We all know that the system is broken, and things need to be changed,” said Kastle. “Young people have to understand that their vote does matter because we’ve seen how close elections in Georgia can be.”

The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence reports from Decatur, Georgia

Long voter queues were hard to come by, a sign that can be taken one of two ways: either most residents are already part of the giant early turnout, or simply got turned around. “Because the polling places are different from the early voting locations, that’s caused some confusion,” says Karen “Mix” Mixon, vice-chair of the DeKalb County Democratic Committee.

On a cloudless 75F day, Mixon stood outside an early voting location in the South Dekalb Mall to redirect voters toward their assigned polling place. With SB 202, the aggressive voter suppression law President Biden dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0”, finally baring its teeth on election day, Mixon notes mobilizer groups have to be extra careful about extending help this election cycle. “The law is you have to be 150ft from the building where people are voting, or 25 feet from voters who are standing in line to wait to vote,” Mixon says. “We ordered tape measures that are 150ft long and spray chalk, and we mark that off so that we are following the law.”

With mobilizing groups forbidden from approaching voters to make sure they’re at the right place (much less offer them water), volunteers can basically only wave and smile and yell and hope lost voters approach them. Mixon made herself easy enough to find outside the mall with a sign urging passers by to remind friends to vote.

The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence reports from Atlanta

Mike South cast his ballot at Grace International Church with the economy top of mind. “My retirement has shrunk by 50%,” he said. To say he worked hard for it barely tells the story.

After launching a decade long career at Nasa as computers expert following the Challenger explosion, South, 64, pivoted to directing and acting in adult movies before cementing his legend as an industry gossip columnist. In 2013, CNBC pronounced him one of porn’s 10 most powerful people.

Porn drove his political engagement. “There was a time when free speech would’ve been an issue, especially in Atlanta,” he says. “Most of the people in my business are hardcore Democrats, but I kinda stand out because I’m more libertarian – which I would expect them to be.”

South says he voted for libertarian candidates whenever possible, including in the senate race between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock. (“The truth is I don’t like either one of them,” he quipped, as his support dog Lola heeled.) Third-party voters could have a significant impact on that race, which is trending closer toward another senate runoff. A new Warnock ad tips voters to the possibility of having to return to the polls again over the holiday season.

After being barraged with campaign ads for the past seven years, in the country, South winces at the thought of yet another trip to the polls. “I’m over it.”

Election officials in Georgia’s largest county removed two workers from a polling site on the morning of Tuesday’s midterm races after their colleagues shared social media posts of the pair at the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.

Fulton county elections officials told media outlets that they fired the workers – a mother and her son – about 15 minutes before the polls opened Tuesday morning. They had been assigned to a polling site at a library in the community of Johns Creek.

The mother and son fell under scrutiny after the woman made a comment that caught the attention of a colleague while they were at an event for poll workers, Fulton county’s interim elections director, Nadine Williams, told the local news station WSB-TV. Colleagues of the woman also found social media posts by her which were reported to the county, WSB-TV added.

Williams would not elaborate on the nature of the posts. But the Washington Post reported that it was provided with copies of the social media screeds in question, and they showed the woman’s family forming part of the mob of Donald Trump supporters who staged the Capitol attack.

According to the newspaper, one of the posts read: “I stood up for what’s right today in Washington DC. This election was a sham. [Trump vice-president] Mike Pence is a traitor. I was tear gassed FOUR times. I have pepper spray in my throat. I stormed the Capitol building. And my children have had the best learning experience of their lives.”

Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in a failed attempt to prevent the congressional certification of the former Republican president’s defeat to his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the 2020 election. One of the mob’s stated aims was to hang Pence after it falsely accused him of failing to avail himself of the ability to single-handedly prevent Biden’s certification.

Officials have linked nine deaths to the insurrection, including suicides by law enforcement officers traumatized after successfully defending the building from the pro-Trump mob. Hundreds of participants have been charged criminally in connection with the attack, and many have either pleaded guilty or otherwise have been convicted over their roles.

During the 2020 presidential race, Fulton county experienced long lines at the polls, administrative mistakes and death threats against election workers. The Washington Post reported that the turmoil during the election two years earlier prompted Fulton county to prepare for Tuesday’s midterms – which many regard as a referendum on American democracy – by assigning police to more than half of its 300 or so polling places, with other officers patrolling between sites.

Georgia is holding some of Tuesday’s most-closely watched elections, including the race between incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker that could determine which political party controls the US Senate.

A rematch from the 2018 electoral showdown between incumbent Republican governor Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams is also being watched nationwide on Tuesday.

When Jeff Zapor showed up at his polling place in South Lyon, in the Detroit suburbs, on Tuesday, the most pressing race on his mind was the contest for secretary of state, the elected official who oversees voting and elections in Michigan.

That in itself is extraordinary. Long overlooked downballot races, there has been an enormous amount of attention on secretary of state races since the 2020 election, when their role in overseeing vote counting came into focus as Donald Trump tried to overturn the election. Michigan is one of several states where the Republican nominee for secretary of state questioned and tried to overturned the results of the 2020 race.

Standing outside his polling place, an elementary school, Michigan, Zapor said he voted for Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, who is running for a second term. She leads her opponent Kristina Karamo, a community college professor, in the polls.

“I think election deniers on the ballot is a very dangerous thing,” Zapor, a 46-year-old mental health counselor said. “When you’re running on a platform of complete abject falsehoods, to me, that shows a complete lack of character. And you’re running for the exact wrong reason.”

Zapor added that he was concerned that there could be a repeat of efforts to overturn the election, like there were in 2020.

“I think it’s a certainty. I’m very concerned. Both in Michigan and in the nation, in 2024, I guess even in this election, will continue to be divisive and to see violence would not surprise me. I really hope I’m wrong, but that’s what I think,” he said.

South Lyon is a competitive area in Oakland county, a battleground in Michigan.

Another voter, who would only give his middle name, Alex, said he was also deeply concerned about election denialism.

“I’m concerned in general that the truth in general has eluded us and many will continue to leverage what happened in 2020 and for false information in general,” he said.

Another voter, who would only give his first name, Tom, said he voted for Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, because she was the “lesser of two evils.” He said he also voted for Benson, who sees the state’s motor vehicle offices in addition to elections, because he recently had a quick appointment renewing his driver’s license.

“She did what she said he was going to do,” he said.