Midterm elections 2026: Live updates, election results and key races across the country

The Justice Department released Tuesday its list of jurisdictions where it plans to send election monitors, in what it is describing as the "largest" federal monitoring effort in history.

The department's statement says it will dispatch a total of roughly 1,000 monitors to all 50 states -- though in a court hearing Monday an official estimated the number was closer to 900, because the department was having initial difficulties identifying and training personnel for the effort in time for Election Day.

Election monitor deployments are a routine practice across administrations typically with staff from the DOJ Civil Rights Division's Voting Section, though the announcements have been subject to growing criticism from Democrats in recent months given the Trump administration's aggressive pursuit of voter data that they say is intended to ensure undocumented immigrants aren't registered to vote.

DOJ has also disclosed it is pulling in officials from outside agencies such as the Bureau of Prisons and the Drug Enforcement Administration to join the election monitoring effort, though an official assured a federal judge yesterday that all from those agencies would be "clerical" workers who are not authorized to carry guns as part of their daily work.

D.C. District judge Reggie Walton rejected an emergency effort yesterday to limit DOJ's election monitoring program that was brought by civil rights groups including the NAACP, after finding the groups failed to put forward sufficient evidence that the monitors would prove intimidating to voters.

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.

After months of candidates campaigning, Tuesday marks the midterm elections.

The balance of power in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives is up for grabs on Tuesday as Republicans and Democrats vie for seats in key races across the country. There are also significant races for governor around the country.

More than 57 million early votes have been cast nationwide as of Monday afternoon, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. That number is set to outpace the more than 58 million total number of early votes cast in 2022.