Election Day Begins; Early Voting Surge11/03 06:45

   The final day of voting in this year's midterm elections arrived Tuesday 
against a backdrop of uncertainty after a year in which President Donald Trump 
has tried to interfere in how states run their elections and sown doubts about 
the outcome should Republicans lose.

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- The final day of voting in this year's midterm elections 
arrived Tuesday against a backdrop of uncertainty after a year in which 
President Donald Trump has tried to interfere in how states run their elections 
and sown doubts about the outcome should Republicans lose.

   Millions of Americans already have cast their ballots, with early voting 
turnout on pace to eclipse that of the last midterm elections. In contrast to 
the president's continued rhetoric about election cheating, voting so far has 
unfolded with relatively few problems.

   Trump has spent months trying to use the power of the presidency to put his 
thumb on the scale of this year's elections, which will determine whether his 
party keeps control of Congress.

   His Justice and Homeland Security departments have been involved in a 
massive hunt for voters who are not U.S. citizens, at one point engaging in a 
made-for-the-cameras predawn operation that led to more than two dozen arrests 
in California. The Department of Justice was planning its largest-ever effort 
to monitor Election Day polling places, countered by an even larger effort 
among Democrats and allied groups, and at the president's urging had sued to 
block certification of Alaska's results if the outcome of the Senate race 
favored Democrats.

   At the same time, Trump's constant false claims about widespread voter fraud 
led election officials and Democratic groups across the country to plan for the 
possibility of immigration agents at voting sites or federal officers seizing 
voting machines. His administration has insisted that no armed federal 
officials would be guarding the polls on Election Day.

   Courts have blocked the Trump administration's efforts to influence 
elections 

   In the run-up to Tuesday, none of the steps Democrats most feared had come 
to pass, and the Republican administration's legal maneuvers had been largely 
blocked by the courts.

   One of the Trump administration's most high-profile attempts to interfere in 
state elections was turned away Monday night by the U.S. Supreme Court, which 
rejected its push to force California to set aside thousands of ballots as part 
of its search for noncitizen voters. In another Monday night ruling, a federal 
judge said the Trump administration must stop sending voter lists of alleged 
noncitizens to election officials.

   Even the administration's own record of arrests and charges has demonstrated 
what research and state investigations have made clear for years -- that 
instances of noncitizens casting ballots are extremely rare.

   Monday's rulings followed another defeat for the president at the Supreme 
Court less than two months ago, when it rejected his attempt to limit mail 
balloting through changes at the Postal Service. That directive was included in 
one of two executive orders Trump has signed during his second term that 
attempted to federalize certain aspects of elections, even though the 
Constitution gives the states, and sometimes Congress, the authority to set 
election rules.

   Voting begins smoothly with some weather disruptions in the Southwest 

   The first polling sites opened at 6 a.m. EST Tuesday in a handful of states 
-- Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, New Jersey, New 
York and Virginia.

   Heavy rains and flash flooding in a swath of the Southwest were expected to 
make it harder for some voters to reach polling places in parts of Colorado, 
Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Election administrators in the Navajo Nation 
announced changes to several of its polling locations, and in Utah's rural San 
Juan County, voters were being allowed to vote electronically on Tuesday 
because some of them may not be able to reach polling places.

   Election administrators and voting rights advocates have been advising 
voters casting late absentee ballots to use drop boxes or deliver them to 
polling places in person rather than mail them. The advice came after concerns 
emerged that recent changes in U.S. Postal Service operations could result in 
postmarking delays that would mean mail ballots could not be counted. 
Late-arriving ballots or late postmarks disenfranchised tens of thousands of 
voters in California, Oregon and Washington, which mail ballots to all voters, 
during this year's primaries.

   Trump hasn't committed to accepting the election results 

   The most significant disruptions ahead of Election Day were the Trump 
administration's attempts to interfere. Voting rights groups, Democrats and the 
Justice Department have been exchanging a flurry of legal filings over alleged 
noncitizen voters, federal election monitors, federal intimidation of election 
officials and other concerns. They reveal how Trump's attempts to expand 
federal control over state-run elections -- combined with high-stakes races -- 
are resulting in court battles that could extend past Election Day into ballot 
counting and certification of the results.

   Election law experts said Trump's lawsuits go beyond historic norms, but 
they said the administration's legal arguments were unlikely to convince the 
courts.

   Trump also has ramped up his own equivocations about whether the election 
will be legitimate, as he has in the past. A week before Election Day, when a 
reporter asked him if he would accept the results, he offered a qualified 
answer.

   "I will if they are honest," he said.