Polls opened at 7 a.m. on Election Day in Pennsylvania, but not in Laflin Borough, in Luzerne County. The polls there opened at 8:30, an hour and a half late.

In response, the Luzerne County Board of Elections went to court seeking permission to extend voting hours in Laflin, which is near Wilkes-Barre. The court agreed to the extension and ordered the polling place to be open for 90 extra minutes, closing at 9:30 p.m.

The Luzerne County Democrat party and the state Republican Party joined the county in requesting an extension.

The court filing did not explain why the polling place opened late, saying only that the Board of Elections learned that “election officers failed to timely open the polling location in Laughlin which resulted in delays in the process of voting.”

Local television WNEP reported that the judge of elections arrived late and when the poll did finally open, workers could not open the ballot scanner, leaving the first voters to vote by paper.    

Bad Ballots

Voting was extended in Cambria County too, after the electronic voting system software malfunctioned. This caused long lines, and some voters left before voting.

According to Cambria’s court filing to request extended voting hours, the system was down for hours and was not functioning by the time the county filed the request for more time.

The court agreed to extend voting until 10 p.m., but after 8 p.m. in Cambria, all votes will be provisional.    

The Department of

Infamous for delays in counting ballots, it looks like Milwaukee’s Election Day tabulation will go long into the night once again amid tabulator and ballot security problems. 

Swing state Wisconsin’s most populous city will have to recount some 31,000 absentee ballots previously counted thanks to an unsealed tabulator, sources at Milwaukee’s Central Count location tell The Federalist. Each ballot must be recounted. 

It’s a mess, according to Republican observers at the scene. 

‘Layers of Issues’

When the day began after about an hour’s delay, observers inspected the sealed tabulator machines, a poll watcher told The Federalist. All was well at that time, the source said. 

“Later one of our observers noticed that the seals (on the machines) had been broken,” the source said. They had effectively been unlocked, presenting a potential integrity breach, the observer said. Sources say about a dozen machines had apparently been compromised. By whom remained unclear as of 5:30 p.m. Milwaukee time, just 2 1/2 hours before Wisconsin’s polls close. 

“We were waiting and waiting to get a count and all of a sudden they made the decision that they were going to zero out all of the wards in every machine and that they were going to re-run all of those ballots for various reasons, the most prominent being the broken seals,” the observer said.  

But not all of the tabulators were up and running before 6 p.m. Milwaukee time, said the source, who sent The Federalist a photo of empty tables at Central

Even before polls opened on Election Day, legacy media were already pushing the narrative that the country would be seeing a “red mirage” on Nov. 5, claiming Republican margins will appear greater than they actually are before large numbers of likely-Democrat absentee ballots are counted.

“You’re going to see a ‘red mirage,’ where it seems like Trump is doing better than he actually is, because they haven’t counted and reported those absentee ballots yet, then the blue shift when those ballots are introduced to add to the totals — that could be in the middle of the night. It certainly was in 2020,” Wisconsin Democrat Party Chair Ben Wikler said on MSNBC on Tuesday. 

In 2020, Election Day came to an end with Trump leading the race by “comfortable margins,” as The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson wrote. However, early morning ballot dumps the next day in the crucial states of Wisconsin and Michigan somehow “showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent — that’s zero, so not even one vote — for Trump.”

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Democrats and the media sought to normalize concepts like the so-called “red mirage,” working to, as The Federalist previously noted, “prim[e] voters to expect GOP gains to evaporate once mail-in and absentee ballots — which skew heavily Democratic — are counted in the coming days and weeks.”

They’re perpetuating the same psyop in 2024.

The margin in Wisconsin is currently razor thin, with RealClearPolitics placing Harris 0.4