Election Day 2026 live updates: DOJ election monitors to be dispatched across all 50 states

An issue involving paper ballots is “preventing voting machines from accepting ballots" in Westchester County north of New York City Tuesday morning, state and local officials said early Tuesday.

Westchester is part of the 17th Congressional District, home to a high-profile House race in the Empire State between Republican incumbent Mike Lawler and Democratic challenger Cait Conley, and covers northern Westchester County.

The county election board said voters should remain in line and exercise patience, and assured residents that their vote would count. Voters are being asked to place paper ballots in orange bags, "which will remain secure and monitored,” officials said.

"These ballots will subsequently be counted in accordance with applicable election procedures,” the county said.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said the thickness of the paper ballots was making it difficult for the machines to read them. The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, said her office was monitoring the issue as local officials “work on a solution.”

-ABC News’ Jared Kofsky and Lucien Bruggeman

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.

-ABC News’ Alexander Mallin

President Donald Trump dismissed the cost of the Iran war in his final broadcast message before Election Day, saying that the price tag was "peanuts" compared to what he claimed the U.S. has earned through some of his other foreign interventions.

The president's comments came as part of a long defense of the war after Fox News' Sean Hannity asked Trump how he could assure the American people that the war was about stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and that it would end.

Toward the end of his response, Trump launched into a criticism of Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, which he has recently made part of his campaign trail stump speech, referencing an appearance on Fox News where he claims Khanna criticized the amount the U.S. has spent on the war.

"We've created $25 trillion worth of ‘worth’ since I entered office on January 20th,” Trump added, going on to say later that “worth” and “wealth” were essentially interchangeable.

The U.S. military now estimates that through mid-October the war with Iran has cost $47 billion according to a U.S. Central Command document reviewed by ABC News.

-ABC News' Nicholas Kerr

On election eve, in the race for the wide-open U.S. Senate seat in Iowa, Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson told the press that President Donald Trump's visit in Dubuque helped her get her final message out to voters.

"Josh Turek's too liberal for Iowa, and I think the president helped tell that story," she said. She again attacked her opponent on transgender issues and immigration, despite Turek saying he opposes men playing in women's sports and is willing to work with the president to secure the border.

Pressed on whether she had put enough distance between herself and the president, Hinson said that she delivered for Iowans under President Joe Biden and when Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House.

"I'm always going to be somebody's ally if they're willing to work with me on something that's right for Iowa, but I will be a thorn in their side if they are wrong for Iowa," she said.

When asked about the integrity of the election, Hinson pledged to accept the outcome.

"It's easy to vote and hard to cheat here in Iowa. I'm confident that I will win, and I will accept whatever the outcome is tomorrow, but I believe that outcome will be that I'm going to be the next United States senator," she said.

-ABC News' Gaby Vinick