File photo of U.S. Senate Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed . El-Sayed graduated from the University of Michigan, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctorate in public health. He received his medical degree from Columbia University, where he also served as an assistant professor of epidemiology before becoming Detroit’s top public health official. Haley Stevens’ GOP endorsement is “galvanizing” voters behind Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic rep Debbie Dingell said on Tuesday
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Polls are opening across the USA Tuesday morning, after more than 58 million Americans already voted early, according to the University of Florida Voting Lab. All 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are on the ballot, while 36 states will be electing governors. All eyes will be on the 11 battleground Senate races: Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Texas and Alaska. There are 49 districts that are considered battlegrounds. Candidates across the country made their closing pitches to voters on Monday night, while President Trump delivered remarks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Mr. Trump will be monitoring the election results from the White House, an administration official said. New York’s Westchester County, parts of which are in the battleground 17th District, reported ballot scanners were down as polls opened on Tuesday. Watch live coverage of election results Tuesday evening on CBS News and get the latest updates on CBSNews.com and streaming onCBS News 24/7.
Election Day voting in Florida could be impacted by 1,000-year rain event
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.
Ballot scanners down at most Westchester County polling sites, officials say
Voting machines at most polling sites in Westchester County are not accepting ballots due to an issue, 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.
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.
DOJ says it will monitor elections in all 50 states for the first time
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 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.”
El-Sayed highlights his “bet on Michigan”
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’ 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.”
Talarico predicts Texas Senate results will “shock the world,” Paxton says it will “come down to the wire”
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 closing message, Democratic Kansas Senate hopeful Adam Hamilton vows to become GOP senator’s “best friend”
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.’”
Supreme Court rejects Trump’s effort to force California to separate mail ballots from alleged noncitizens
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 interventionearlier 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.
Debbie Dingell: Haley Stevens’ GOP endorsement is “galvanizing” voters behind Abdul El-Sayed
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.
How ranked choice voting will work in Alaska Senate race with 2 Dan Sullivans
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%.
One-third of Michigan’s active registered voters had voted by 7 a.m. on Election Day
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.
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2026 elections live updates as polls open across the country in battle for Senate and House control
By Caroline Linton, Joe Walsh
Updated on: November 3, 2026 / 10:02 AM EST / CBS News
What to know about Election Day for the 2026 midterms:
- Polls are opening across the country Tuesday morning, after more than 59 million Americans already voted early, according to the University of Florida Voting Lab.
- All 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are on the ballot, while 36 states will be electing governors. All eyes will be on the 11 battleground Senate races: Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Texas and Alaska. There are 49 House districts that are considered battlegrounds.
- Candidates across the country made their closing pitches to voters on Monday night, while President Trump delivered remarks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Mr. Trump will be monitoring the election results from the White House, an administration official said.
- New York’s Westchester County, part of the battleground 17th District, reported ballot scanners were down as polls opened on Tuesday.
- Watch live coverage of election results Tuesday evening on CBS News and get the latest updates on CBSNews.com and streaming onCBS News 24/7.
Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson casts ballot in Forsyth County, praises voting process
Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson voted in person Tuesday in Forsyth County, saying the experience reinforced his confidence in Georgia’s voting system.
“It makes you feel very comfortable in the integrity of our voting system,” Jackson said.
Jackson said he had voted absentee in recent elections but wanted to cast his ballot in person while running for governor. He estimated 15 to 20 people were in line and praised workers for their efficiency and professionalism.
“I feel like I’ve done all I can do. I’m leaving it up to God,” Jackson said. “Whatever happens, my purpose in life is for kingdom impact and to help the least of us. No matter what happens, that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow.”
N.Y. county officials say “every eligible vote will be counted” despite issue with scanners
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.
One-third of Michigan’s active registered voters had voted by 7 a.m. on Election Day
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.
Why some 2026 races won’t be decided on election night, and why that doesn’t mean foul play
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.
CBS
