Associated Press
Federal authorities are monitoring voting and any threats to the election across the country at an operations center just outside Washington, D.C., run by the cyber-security component of the Department of Homeland Security.
Officials there said there were no major problems detected early Tuesday but urged the public to be wary and patient.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Christopher Krebs said from the center there was “some early indication of system disruption,” but he did not elaborate. He says he has “confidence that the vote is secure, the count is secure and the results will be secure.”
Krebs says officials have seen attempts by foreign actors “to interfere in the 2020 election.” But he says officials “have addressed those threats quickly” and “comprehensively.”
Krebs says Election Day “in some sense is half-time.” He says, “There may be other events or activities or efforts to interfere and undermine confidence in the election.” He asks all Americans “to treat all sensational and unverified claims with skepticism and remember technology sometimes fails.”
Nearly 100 million Americans voted early, and now it falls to Election Day voters to finish the job, ending a campaign that was upended by the coronavirus and defined by tensions over who could best address it. Each candidate declared the other fundamentally unfit to lead a nation grappling with COVID-19 and facing foundational questions about racial justice and economic fairness.
Voters braved long lines and the threat of the virus to cast ballots as they chose between two starkly different visions of America for the next four years.
The record-setting early vote — and legal skirmishing over how it will be counted — drew unsupported allegations of fraud from President Donald Trump, who refused to guarantee he would honor the election’s result.
Fighting to the end for every vote, Joe Biden was headed to Philadelphia and his native Scranton on Tuesday as part of a closing get-out-the-vote effort before awaiting election results in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
