Polls began opening at 5 a.m. ET in Vermont and rolled open across the rest of the country through the morning as Election Day 2026 finally arrived, capping a brutal, record-spending midterm cycle that will decide control of both chambers of Congress for the final two years of President Trump's second term.

All 435 U.S. House seats are on the ballot, along with roughly a third of the Senate and a wave of governor's races that have swung from safe to toss-up in the campaign's final days — Iowa, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Alaska and South Carolina among them. Polling hours vary widely by state: Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania and New York open between 6 and 7 a.m. ET, Ohio and North Carolina at 6:30 a.m., and the first polls close at 6 p.m. in Indiana and Kentucky. New York doesn't close until 9 p.m., New Jersey at 8 p.m. — and neither state allows same-day registration.

A late surge, and a late fight in the courts

Early voting broke records heading into Tuesday, with tens of millions of ballots already cast by mail or in person before polls opened. But the final 48 hours were dominated almost as much by litigation as by campaigning. A flurry of election lawsuits piled up in the campaign's closing days, including fights over how to handle ballots cast by alleged non-citizens, federal election monitors, and claims of intimidation against local election officials. An appeals court this week halted a lower-court order that would have directed the Trump administration to stop instructing state officials to set aside or decline to count those ballots, while the Supreme Court separately rejected a Trump administration bid to segregate mail-in ballots in California.

In Alaska, two lawsuits allege that absentee-in-person voting sites in rural communities failed to open as scheduled ahead of Tuesday's vote, even as a federal judge separately tossed a Justice Department suit that had sought to delay certification of the state's results. On the ground, officials in Maricopa County, Arizona reported that two of the county's 254 polling locations had to be temporarily closed Tuesday morning because of power-related issues — a hiccup election authorities said was isolated rather than systemic.

DEMOCRATS ENTER ELECTION DAY WITH A 9-POINT EDGE IN THE GENERIC CONGRESSIONAL BALLOT, PER CNN'S POLL OF POLLS

Despite the legal noise, CNN's live coverage described voting unfolding with relatively few problems through the morning, with observers from both parties watching polling places more closely than in past cycles. Democrats enter the day with a nine-point advantage in CNN's Poll of Polls on the generic congressional ballot, a margin that, if it holds, would be enough to flip House control — though strategists in both parties caution that district-by-district dynamics, not the national mood, will decide most of the closest races.

What's next

Results will begin trickling in as East Coast polls close starting at 6 p.m. ET, but full counts in several key states are expected to stretch into Wednesday or later given the volume of mail and provisional ballots still to be processed. Both parties have legal teams on standby in the closest contests, and officials in several battleground states have warned voters not to expect final calls on election night itself.