HENRICO, Va. (AP) — In-person voting for this year’s midterm elections began Friday, ushering in the final six weeks for Americans to decide which party they trust to lead Congress through a cost-of-living crisis, a prolonged war in Iran and other pressing issues.
Election administrators say they are prepared and confident the vote will be accurate and secure. Nevertheless, President Donald Trump has continued with efforts to denigrate certain voting methods and reshape how elections are run, through court challenges, an expansive federal hunt for noncitizen voters and a pressure campaign to force election officials to share sensitive voter data.
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Friday marked the start of early voting in Virginia. Voters in a handful of other states, including Idaho, Minnesota and South Dakota, can cast absentee ballots in person, typically at a local election office or voting center. More expansive early voting is scheduled to begin in those and other states in the coming weeks.
At a voting location in Fairfax, Virginia, 18-year-old college student Sanya Singhal was among the first to vote early in person Friday morning, arriving well before the site opened to get in line.
“Why not just have a little fun in life, you know, try to be the first early voter?” she said. “I really want to participate in my democracy.”
At a voting location in suburban Richmond, a poll worker rang a bell as the building opened and about a dozen voters in line began to file in. Stephen Gura was excited to be the first.
“This election is critical. We need to stop the Trump agenda. We need to start electing people who will stand up for people in this district,” said Gura, who added that he voted for U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Shannon Taylor, the Democratic nominee against Republican incumbent Rob Wittman in the 1st Congressional District.
The Nov. 3 election includes votes for governor and state legislature in most states and will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House and Senate. If Democrats retake Congress, it will alter the trajectory of the final two years of Trump’s term, most likely leading to investigations and other oversight efforts.
At the suburban Richmond voting center, a steady stream of voters flowed in and out for the first hour of early voting.
William Curry, a 74-year-old retiree who described himself as a libertarian-leaning independent conservative, voted for Warner’s Republican challenger, Bert Mizusawa, and Wittman. Curry said he generally approves of the job Trump has done, apart from the war with Iran.
“He’s in a mess he can’t get rid of,” Curry said of the conflict. Still, that issue did not affect Curry's vote.
The start of early voting comes at a time of deep angst among many Americans about issues including rising gas and grocery prices, the war in Iran, the looming risks of artificial intelligence and Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.
It also follows an unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House that began when Trump urged the Republican-controlled legislature in Texas to redraw its congressional map to help the party. California and other states followed.
The changes affect millions of people: Research shows 1 in 10 Americans this fall is a resident of a different congressional district than in 2024.
Those partisan efforts are expected to continue before the 2028 elections after a landmark ruling this year from the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the federal Voting Rights Act’s protections against racially discriminatory redistricting.
As the start of early voting approached, Trump was focused on efforts to assert federal control over election administration, even as the Constitution bestows the power to run elections on the states and, in some cases, Congress. The nation's highest court rejected Trump's bid to restrict mail ballots this week, but several of his administration's other efforts to influence the voting process and mine state voter lists for illegitimate voters continue.
Virginia's attorney general said Thursday that Trump's administration may have violated several of the state's laws after a whistleblower accused federal employees of misrepresenting themselves on voter lookup tools to hunt for noncitizen voters. In a letter, Attorney General Jay Jones demanded that the Department of Homeland Security confirm in writing whether it had directed anyone to access Virginia voters’ information without first obtaining permission from those voters.
Trump for years has raised the specter of widespread noncitizen voting in U.S. elections, and this year is no exception. But despite his administration's insistence that hundreds of thousands of people are illegally on voting rolls across the country, research continues to show noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare.
David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Republican president continues “his disinformation campaign and his attack on election officials.” But he said he thinks despite that and other challenges, “ultimately the process will hold as it has in past years.”
Voting rights advocates have encouraged voters this year to cast mail ballots early, in part because of concerns about recent changes in U.S. Postal Service operations that could delay the application of postmarks to ballots.
“Voting early, whether in person or by mail, is good for all of our communities because it gives voters options, eases lines on Election Day and can even mean faster results,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and CEO of the voting rights group All Voting Is Local.
In a news briefing Thursday, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon urged people not to be swayed by stories they might have seen or read that cast doubt on election operations. They would be able to vote “just like they always have,” he said.
“I just want to reaffirm that Minnesota’s elections are fundamentally free, fair, accurate, honest and secure,” he said.
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Swenson reported from New York and Raza from Sioux Falls, S.D. Associated Press writer Mike Catalini in Philadelphia and AP video journalist Nathan Ellgren in Fairfax, Va., contributed to this report.
