MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We know the big top lines of this election, including Donald Trump's return to the White House, but counting continues in several states. Important to note that. But to talk about that and just how Election Day voting went in general, we're joined this morning by NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks, who's here with us in studio. Good morning.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Michel.
MARTIN: OK, the big takeaway here - voting seemed to have gone smoothly, right?
PARKS: It did.
MARTIN: Across the country?
PARKS: Yeah, absolutely. And according to the University of Florida's Turnout lab, it seems like a really high-turnout election, one of the highest in recent history, second only to 2020. Here's how Republican Secretary of State of Georgia Brad Raffensperger put it to NPR.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER: We had record turnout. We were over 5 million - 5,222,397 votes were cast today, on the early voting period we had and also absentees accepted so far.
MARTIN: OK. And what about the counting of all those votes?
PARKS: It's also gone really smoothly. There were some isolated incidents, most notably a tabulator issue in Milwaukee that set that count back a little bit. They had to rescan about 30,000 ballots. But those sort of things happen every single election. What we haven't seen this year is the sort of interference we saw in 2020 with large groups of people gathering trying to interfere with the count. And that probably has a lot to do with the fact of who's winning, right? Donald Trump was pushing for people to gather in 2020 when it looked like things were not going to go his way. Obviously, we are dealing with a very different set of election results this time around. And those concerns from Trump and his allies seem to have kind of dissipated.
MARTIN: There were a series of bomb threats at polling places across the country. It does not seem to have caused major disruptions. But what do we know about them?
PARKS: So U.S. intelligence officials said they appeared to come from Russian email domains, but we don't exactly know who sent them or exactly what they said. They were sent to a number of politically important locations in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, a number of other states. It's a little bit unclear at this point exactly how many there were. It seems like dozens, potentially up to 100. And generally, as you mentioned, they didn't seem to affect voting too much. There were a few evacuations, and some polling places in Georgia, for instance, did stay open for an extra hour or so as a result. So on the one hand, this is a very disturbing development to ever happen on an Election Day. But on the other hand, what I heard from election security experts is that this showed - the response from election officials showed that this was something they were preparing for ahead of this election.
MARTIN: And, Miles, you know, that race calls came much faster this year than in 2020 and, in fact, I just have to be honest, a lot faster than many of us expected. A lot of us had kind of settled in for the long haul, right? We had our special snacks and all of that.
PARKS: Yeah.
MARTIN: So what changed?
PARKS: So margins are the most important thing when it comes to how quickly outlets can make race calls. And this is starting to look like a fairly decisive victory. But there are also new rules in a number of states that did speed up counting, as well as a big factor is that there were just less mail ballots cast across the country than there were in 2020, and we know mail ballots little longer to count than in-person voting. I will say, though, the Western part of the United States is where most of those mail ballots are concentrated. And so you can see we are still waiting for results, a lot of results in California, Nevada, Arizona, and that's a big reason why it's still unclear who is going to end up controlling the U.S. House of Representatives.
MARTIN: That is NPR Miles Parks. Miles, thank you.
PARKS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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