2026 elections live updates as Americans cast ballots with polls opening across the country in midterm elections

The Board of Legislators in New York's Westchester County said Tuesday that "every eligible vote will be counted" despite an ongoing issue with ballot scanners.

The Board of Legislators said that while the issue is being resolved, voters should continue to cast their ballots as instructed and ballots that cannot be scanned will be "securely collected and counted in accordance with election procedures."

Attorney General Letitia James posted on social media that her office is monitoring the issue.

Parts of Westchester County are in the battleground 17th U.S. House District, where incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Lawler faces Democrat Cait Conley. Both candidates urged voters to stay in line and cast their ballots.

 By 7 a.m. Tuesday, 32.9% of Michigan's active registered voters had already cast ballots, according to state data, as Election Day began.

That includes 750,469 people who voted early in person this election. The remaining votes will come from people voting on Election Day and from absentee ballots turned in late.

In the 2024 presidential election, more than 1.2 million people voted early in person.

Voters are deciding the race for governor between Democrat Jocelyn Benson and Republican John James, and an open U.S. Senate seat, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers. Both pairs won their party primaries in August.

Read more at CBS Detroit. 

Control of the House and Senate may not be immediately clear on election night, and some of the 2026 midterm election calls will take longer than others. But that's not unusual or an indication of fraud, as some candidates may claim.

As the nation watches to see how the elections unfold on Tuesday night, election experts advise voters against listening to politicians who cry foul without offering evidence of fraud as ballots are being cast or counted. Many key races will be close. And when they're close, the results are likely to come later. 

David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a CBS News contributor, says he has some doubts about whether Americans will even know who controls the House or Senate on election night. 

"If we do, then there's a very big wave going on," Becker said.

Read more here. 

An extreme rainfall event in parts of Florida could impact voting on Tuesday, as what's known as a "1,000-year" incident brings flooding to areas along the state's southwestern coast. 

In St. Lucie County, about an hour or so north of Palm Beach by car, the supervisor of elections announced changes to the county's polling places on Monday afternoon, as a result of flooded roads.

"Due to inclement weather and flooding that has affected road access to certain polling locations, the following precincts have been temporarily relocated to ensure voters have safe and accessible locations to cast their ballots," the elections supervisor said, adding that staff would continue evaluating sites to determine whether they're "functional" or not.

More rain is expected to fall in sections of Florida already affected by inclement weather, including St. Lucie County, through Wednesday, forecasters said. According to the National Weather Service in Melbourne, Florida, a "1,000-year" rainfall event "means there is a 0.1% chance of rainfall of this magnitude occurring in any given year — not that it can only happen once every 1,000 years."

"This exceptionally rare event underscores the importance of flood preparedness and flood insurance, even in areas outside designated high-risk flood zones," the weather service said.

Voting machines at most polling sites in Westchester County, north of New York City, are not accepting ballots due to an issue with the scanners, according to the county executive.

The scanners started experiencing problems when the polls opened at 6 a.m. Tuesday. 

Voters are being instructed to stay in line and fill out a paper ballot, which will be put into a secure box. Officials stressed that every ballot will be counted.

Both candidates in the district's hotly contested House race, Republican incumbent Rep. Mike Lawler and Democrat Cait Conley, urged voters to stay in line and cast their ballots.

County Executive Ken Jenkins said there is no word as to when the problem will be fixed. The New York State Board of Elections is working with county officials to handle the situation. 

Read more at CBS News New York. 

The Department of Justice issued a release early Tuesday saying that for the first time, it will be deploying approximately 1,000 election monitors and observers to all 50 states. 

According to the release from the Justice Department, the election monitors will be checking for compliance with the federal voting rights statutes that fall within their jurisdiction, which include federal statutes that protect the right to vote, including the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act, Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, and Civil Rights Acts.

In a statement, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant district attorney for the Civil Rights Division, said she is "very proud we are deploying the largest monitoring effort in DOJ history, and pursuing transparency for elections in an assertive and nondiscriminatory manner."

As polls are starting to open in the U.S. early Tuesday, President Trump piled more criticism onto Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, accusing him of hating Jewish, Black and White people.

"Abdul El-Sayed Hates Jews and Hates Blacks. Don't feel bad, he also Hates Whites," Mr. Trump claimed in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The president said "only fools" would vote for El-Sayed, whom he claimed would "100% do you in!"

The battle for the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, between El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers, which could prove decisive in the race to control the Senate, has been contentious. A late surprise endorsement by Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens of Rogers over her own Democratic colleague last week shook up the race. According to Stevens' House colleague Rep. Debbie Dingell, however, it is having the opposite effect of what Stevens intended, "galvanizing many communities" behind El-Sayed.

The shocking cross-party endorsement over the weekend that shook up Michigan's Senate race featured heavily in Republican Mike Rogers' final speech Monday night before Election Day — while Democrat Abdul El-Sayed steered clear of the topic in his own Detroit rally.

Rogers spent much of his speech highlighting Democrats who have switched over to his side, including Rep. Haley Stevens, who withdrew her endorsement of El-Sayed over the weekend. 

"Our Sunday … wasn't really planned to look like it was," Rogers told supporters. "But someone else had enough courage to believe that that was more important than party."

Stevens, for her part, addressed the decision in a lengthy social media post late Monday, calling it a "decision of conscience" that she made after deciding El-Sayed was "not fit to serve." She pointed to El-Sayed's decision to disinvite her from campaign events, and their public dayslong rift over the Democratic nominee and his allies' vehement criticism of U.S. aid to Israel.

Stevens' decision outraged many Democrats. But El-Sayed made no mention of the situation in his remarks on Monday, instead focusing on his campaign's core message.

He said that "it shouldn't be this hard" to "afford a tank of gas," to "buy a second bag of groceries" or to "pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids."

He called his campaign a "bet on the goodness of the people of the state of Michigan."

In dueling rallies the night before Election Day, the candidates for Texas' Senate seat expressed optimism about one of the closest — and most expensive — races of 2026.

Speaking to supporters at a restaurant in Allen, Texas, Republican Ken Paxton noted that most polls show the race is "going to come down to the wire." 

Paxton highlighted Democrat James Talarico's partisan loyalties, noting the race could decide which party controls the Senate. He accused Talarico of being a tax-and-spend progressive and — fighting words for Texas — a vegan. He told the crowd: "Texas has never been this close to slipping away."

"I'm not asking you to imagine what I'd do as your U.S. senator. I'm asking you to look at my record, look at what we've already accomplished and then compare that to James Talarico," Paxton said.

At his own concert-style rally in Austin, Talarico predicted that "we are going to shock the nation." His speech was riddled with references to the TV show "Friday Night Lights" and its come-from-behind storylines — nodding to the fact that no Democrat has won statewide in Texas in decades.

Talarico railed against "corrupt tariffs," the "corrupt war in the Middle East" and the hundreds of millions of dollars that Elon Musk has poured into the race to aid Paxton.

"We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis," he said, calling Paxton "the embodiment of this corrupt system."

In his final rally before Election Day, Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton acknowledged that his bid to represent Kansas in the Senate hinges on the state's voters making a history-defying decision.

"The last time a Democrat was elected from Kansas to the United States Senate, Amelia Earhart flew across the Atlantic Ocean for the very first time," he said at an event next door to Church of the Resurrection, the large Methodist church outside Kansas City that he has led for decades.

To defeat Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, Hamilton will need to win over an electorate that backed President Trump by double-digit margins in all three of his presidential runs. He leaned hard into bipartisanship during Monday's rally.

"If I get elected tomorrow night, I'm going to become Jerry Moran's best friend," he said, referring to the state's other Republican senator. "Because I want to model from Kansas for the rest of our country: This is what it looks like when a Republican and Democrat work together. I'm going to work the Democratic side of the aisle. He's going to work the Republican side of the aisle, and we're going to get things done."

His speech focused on the cost of living, healthcare and "decency."

"We've got a lot of people who've lost their freaking minds. They are no longer asking questions like, 'Is this right? Is it decent? Is this good? Is it moral?'" he said.

CBS News spoke to Hamilton supporter Cherri Shannon, who said she and her husband have knocked on doors for about four hours every Saturday for the last few weeks.

"My husband and I sat and complained about politics for a long time," she said. "And finally, I looked at him. I said, 'We got to get off the couch. We got to go do something.'"

President Trump will be monitoring election night from the White House, an administration official said. 

Mr. Trump held several telerallies on Monday and gave remarks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. 

"We gave this a very strong shot," Mr. Trump said Monday. 

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a last-ditch effort from the Trump administration to require California to separate mail ballots received from thousands of people that it claims are "likely" not U.S. citizens.

The court said in a one line, unsigned order that it was denying the Justice Department's request for an injunction requiring election officials from California to set aside the ballots from 20,000 alleged noncitizens. There were no noted dissents. 

The Justice Department sought the Supreme Court's intervention earlier in the day after a divided federal appeals court refused to order California election workers to set aside mail ballots cast by people on a government list.

Read more here.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan said Rep. Haley Stevens' stunning endorsement of GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers over Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is having the opposite effect of what Stevens intended. 

"You're seeing a backlash," Dingell said in an interview on "The Takeout with Major Garrett" on Monday. "It's galvanizing many communities." 

El-Sayed's campaign says it raised more than $2.4 million on Sunday, the same day that Stevens — his former Democratic primary rival — came out in support of Rogers. 

"I've had Black pastors talk to me and say, 'Who said she represented us?' There's a lot of anger in how she did what she did yesterday," Dingell said. 

The endorsement came after days of hostility between El-Sayed and Stevens, who were expected to appear together on Sunday before tensions boiled over. 

Read more here and watch Major Garrett's full interview with Rep. Dingell here. 

President Trump wrapped up his monthlong blitz of campaign appearances with remarks Monday at the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. 

"With your vote, we will decide these extremists will be given power or not power," Mr.Trump said. "We'll either keep America strong — I think we're having, this is the golden age of America. We've never done anything like it."

Mr. Trump said all the records he's made won't matter "if we're going to be foolish and let people who hate our country win an election."

The president acknowledged that a sitting president's party often loses in the midterms. 

"For some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms," the president said. "But we gave this a very strong shot."

Alaska's Senate race has garnered widespread attention amid scrutiny over the presence of a candidate bearing nearly the same name as the sitting Republican senator, Dan Sullivan. The New York Times reported members of Democrat Mary Peltola's campaign recruited Daniel J. Sullivan, a teacher, to join the race, but she said she knew nothing about it.

The winner will be decided under the state's system of ranked choice voting, which was first implemented in 2022.

The top four candidates from the primary are listed on the ballot. Ranked choice voting allows voters to rank as many or as few candidates as they'd like in order of preference, rather than selecting a single candidate on the ballot. 

If nobody wins an outright majority in the first tally, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their supporters' votes are redistributed to each voter's second choice. That process continues until one candidate wins more than 50%.

Read more here.

Two years ago, President Trump made historic gains with Hispanic voters nationwide and won a majority of Texas Hispanics, upending conventional wisdom.

But now, Democrats see signs that Hispanics could shift back, pointing to widespread frustration with the state of the economy and immigration enforcement, and Mr. Trump's sagging approval ratings.

Hispanics make up more than 30% of Texas' eligible electorate, making them a key constituency in the state's Senate, gubernatorial and House races. Polls show a tight contest between Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton, and GOP Gov. Greg Abbott's reelection bid against Democrat Gina Hinojosa could be close, too.

"There's a Hispanic hurricane coming," predicted Democratic strategist and CBS News political contributor Chuck Rocha, who advises Talarico and Hinojosa's campaigns. "We just don't know quite yet if it's going to be Category 2 or Category 5, but it's washing ashore right in front of the GOP, and they don't know what to do about it."

But Republicans say enthusiasm for Democrats is still muted.

"I think most voters couldn't tell you what the Democrat plan is for bringing down prices," said Daniel Garza, president of the conservative LIBRE Initiative.

In one competitive House race in South Texas, both candidates expressed concerns to CBS News about the Trump administration's immigration tactics.

The Democratic candidate, Tejano music star Bobby Pulido, said "there's chaos in the streets" due to "aggressive ICE enforcement."

Incumbent GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz predicted that Texas will remain red. "But I do think that it's a wake-up call for Republicans to remain focused on affordability, and to come to a solution when it comes to immigration," she said.

Read more here.

Control of the House of Representatives will come down to a number of battleground seats. CBS News has identified 47 House districts that will likely determine which party will have the majority.

Of those seats, 20 are currently held by Democrats and 27 are held by Republicans. Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority, with 218 seats, plus an independent who normally caucuses with them. Democrats hold 214 seats. There are two vacancies.

CBS News' Battleground Tracker model estimated on Oct. 25 that Democrats are on track to take control of the House with 229 seats. There is still a path for the GOP to keep the House: The Battleground Tracker's estimates ranged from 215 Democratic seats — which would give Republicans a narrow majority — to 237 seats.

On the Senate side, CBS News has identified 11 key races that could determine control of the Senate.

Eight of those seats are currently held by Republicans: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas.

The other three are held by Democrats: Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire.

Republicans currently hold 53 Senate seats to the Democrats' 47. 

Sen. Susan Collins is being challenged by Democrat Troy Jackson. Voters in Maine know their decision could impact the rest of the country. 

Norm Belanger said for him, it's about having "a balance of power and the checks and balances can hopefully once again work to make sure no one branch of government takes control, I think it's important."

Belanger said he and his wife Elizabeth typically vote for a person over a party. 

"Troy Jackson doesn't excite me. He would not have been my choice for the Democratic candidate," Belanger said. "On the other hand, I think he's the best choice of the two."

Another voter in Kittery said, "There's no white knight here in either party," adding, "Who I end up voting for, is going to be who I think is going to be the least damaging."

Read more from CBS News Boston here. 

CBS News will have extensive live coverage throughout the day, with election results and analysis on all platforms after the polls close Tuesday evening.

• What: Election coverage and results of the 2026 midterms
• Date: Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026  
• Time:
      - All day live coverage streaming on CBS News 24/7
      - 5 p.m. ET:  "Election 2026: The Nerd Show" on CBS News 24/7
      - 7 p.m. ET:  "America Decides: Election 2026," on TV, cable and streaming
• On TV: CBS television stations (find your local station here)
• Online stream: Live on CBS News in the video player above and on your mobile or streaming device 

Beginning at 5 p.m. ET, dive into the latest data on "Election 2026: The Nerd Show," hosted by CBS News executive director of elections and surveys Anthony Salvanto and CBS News congressional correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns, joined by Democratic and Republican pollsters and other election data experts.

At 7 p.m. ET, CBS News prime-time special, "America Decides: Election 2026," covers the latest election results as polls close around the country, anchored by Tony Dokoupil and  Norah O'Donnell, with "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King, "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan, and a team of correspondents and political analysts around the country.

Watch on the free CBS News app on your connected TV or smartphone, on Paramount+, and all platforms where CBS News 24/7 is available, including CBSNews.com and YouTube.