Election officials across several states spent Tuesday chasing down equipment failures, ballot shortages and weather-driven polling changes as millions of Americans cast votes that will decide control of Congress.

The most dramatic failure hit Westchester County, New York, where ballot scanners went dark at multiple polling sites. State officials said the trouble traced back to a last-minute programming change for a single municipal race that was never loaded onto machines countywide. Voters whose ballots couldn't be scanned were handed orange "emergency" ballot bags, which poll workers say will be driven under police escort to a central counting location once polls close and tallied by hand if needed. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the breakdown a "glitch" and urged residents not to be discouraged from voting.

Problems surfaced well beyond the New York suburbs. In Chicago, the city's Board of Elections confirmed a Logan Square precinct ran out of paper ballots while an electronic machine malfunctioned, though officials insisted no one was turned away. In Florida, flooding tied to the storms that have battered the Southeast forced 23 polling locations to relocate at the eleventh hour. Arizona's Maricopa County — ground zero for razor-thin 2026 battleground races — briefly lost power at two vote centers on Monday, and Fulton County, Georgia reported ballot-machine trouble affecting roughly 1,000 early-voting ballots.

Officials Urge Calm

Despite the scattered failures, election administrators from both parties pushed the same message Tuesday: keep voting, and don't assume a malfunction means a vote won't count. CBS News' running tally of voting problems nationwide found no evidence so far that any site's issues were tied to fraud or deliberate interference — just the ordinary strain of running an election with millions of mail and early ballots layered on top of Election Day turnout.

"VOTERS SHOULD HAVE CONFIDENCE IN THE PROCEDURES THAT ARE IN PLACE."

That was the message New York's governor and county election commissioners repeated through the day, even as the Westchester scanner failure drew sharp criticism from online commentators who seized on the outage as fodder for broader complaints about election administration — even though officials in the affected county said the ballots would still be counted.

The stakes could hardly be higher: control of the House and Senate hangs on a handful of races decided by thousands of votes, and any delay in counting emergency ballots could stretch the time before winners are declared in close contests. Westchester's bagged ballots are expected to be tabulated once polls close at 9 p.m. local time, with officials saying the fix will not require a re-vote.

What's next: county boards of election nationwide are expected to release final incident reports in the coming days, and election-security researchers will be watching whether any of Tuesday's scattered failures recur in the same jurisdictions during future contests.