Election office reports failed attempts to hack its online services
ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images
A state election office also saw five spikes in traffic to its ballot drop box locator on Election Day. By 9:30 p.m. EST, analysts had received no reports of a foreign influence operation.
An election office reported that someone probed its online services for weaknesses and tried unsuccessfully to break in Tuesday, while hackers made multiple attempts to guess login credentials at an agency involved in elections, according to an election security report issued Tuesday night.
The findings from the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center offered a fuller picture of the cyber activity election officials have seen as Americans vote in the 2026 midterms.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Monday it would not hold election security briefings with members of the media.
A state election office also recorded five spikes in traffic to a webpage voters use to find ballot drop boxes. The office saw unusual traffic around 11 a.m. EST and said it fell after officials added a CAPTCHA, a check designed to distinguish people from automated requests. The report did not say whether voters had trouble accessing the page.
At the agency that reported the login attempts, activity came from a single internet address. When the agency flagged it, several election offices said they had seen malicious traffic from the same address. None of the attempts succeeded, a person aware of the situation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to communicate their knowledge.
The evening update also detailed how officials accommodated voters after the bomb threat that forced voting outdoors at a Toledo, Ohio, elementary school earlier Tuesday. A court allowed voters assigned to that polling place to cast provisional ballots until 9:15 p.m. local time.
In a mid-Atlantic state, three schools serving as polling places received threatening calls. Two calls involved shooting threats and one involved a bomb threat, according to the report.
As of 9:30 p.m. EST, the centers said they had received no reports of foreign influence operations.
In one southern state, texts gave voters incorrect polling hours. In a southeastern state, a video purported to show ballot boxes being moved outside a county courthouse. Officials said the objects in the video were backup batteries for voting machines.
“I am absolutely willing to accept those results,” President Donald Trump said in an interview with The New York Times Tuesday night, as results poured in showing major Democratic gains in House and Senate races. “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them. We’ll probably work something out,” he added.