“The most available technology at the time in 2024 was text,” said Josh Lawson, the head of civic and strategic risk at OpenAI, who is leading the operation center. “We’re not just monitoring text anymore.”

Now, the potential threats include deep fakes, cyberattacks and foreign and domestic influence operations that can be created and launched with a series of prompts.

The company is not alone. Anthropic, which operates the Claude chatbot, has set up its own “war room” for the first time, assembling teams of analysts in cells in San Francisco, New York and Washington. Google and Meta have also pledged robust efforts to thwart efforts to use their A.I. tools to undermine confidence in the democratic process.

As A.I. becomes increasingly integrated into social and political life online, the companies have all faced criticism for not doing enough to limit malicious content.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights and democracy group at New York University School of Law, found that the most popular chatbots generally pushed back on queries about election-related conspiracy theories. At the same time, the center found, A.I. tools regularly created text, images and videos that could be used to undermine confidence in elections.

The companies’ establishment of war rooms recalls Meta’s creation of one for the 2018 midterm elections following the furor over a Russian interference campaign on Facebook during the 2016 presidential election.

Since then, Meta and other social media platforms scaled back their trust and safety teams, including efforts to police election-related disinformation. They did so under pressure from Republicans and, after 2025, the Trump administration, who accused them of censoring conservative views.

That retreat has coincided with the proliferation of A.I., increasing fears of its impact on elections. Experts and former government officials have warned that technology has created a potent new ways to undermine public confidence in the electoral process even as the Trump administration dismantled the government teams that previously combated efforts to disrupt voting.

“I think it would be foolish to think that threat has dissipated and that technology is not making the threats more potent and believable,” said Lauren Protentis, a former government official who oversaw foreign malign influence on the National Security Council under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

OpenAI stood up its election center last Thursday, assembling a team of employees who are dedicated to monitoring misuse of the world’s most popular chatbot. The team in San Francisco works with a satellite center in Washington and involves scores of people, company officials said.

They examine prompts on ChatGPT that have been automatically flagged for attempts to create false texts or images about the election. That could include prompting the chatbot to design an influence campaign — about stuffing ballots, for example — to spread on a social media platform using fake accounts. The company notifies the platforms when it identifies malign activity intended for use on their site.

OpenAI has already disclosed efforts by Russia, China and Iran to use ChatGPT to carry out foreign influence operations, including two campaigns it disrupted last month. It has not yet disclosed any specific efforts in the midterm elections.

“We’ve been trying to catch operations,” OpenAI’s chief investigator, Ben Nimmo, said in an interview, “before they have a chance to gain traction.”

Ballot measures provide voters an opportunity to weigh in directly, often on policies that their representatives don’t really want changed. Some of the initiatives were proposed by lawmakers, while others were written by voters.

A handful of the proposals seek to regulate ballot measures, by raising the threshold of votes needed for their passage or expanding safeguards to keep lawmakers from altering voter-approved policy.

The outcomes will serve as a reality check, offering “at least some insight into what the voters who turn out in that election think,” Ms. Brewer said.

“Inflation is solved,” Mr. Trump asserted in a morning call to the “Fox & Friends” television show on Tuesday, even though consumer prices have surged since Mr. Trump took office, rising 3.7 percent in September from a year earlier, and inflation has accelerated over high energy costs stemming from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Mr. Trump urged voters to understand that, based on compliments from autocratic world leaders he considers allies, the United States “is the hottest country in the world.”

“We are great now. We were terrible two years ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world,” he said. “The leaders of other countries didn’t even take us seriously.”

Trump also used his Election Day message to address unpopular and controversial foreign policy decisions, including the war in Iran and American support for Israel.

He said that the United States would no longer send $4 billion per year to Israel, citing an agreement he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel made that the aid was no longer needed. Mr. Trump said the move was Mr. Netanyahu’s idea, because he “understands this is one point of contention.” Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Israel is a thriving country, they don’t need it,” Mr. Trump said. “If they did need it, I would say keep going.”

Trump added that the aid was also a “bad talking point” for political opponents, specifically citing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running in a close Senate race in Michigan who has been unvarnished in his criticism of American support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Trump also continued to downplay the war in Iran, which sent gas and other prices surging ahead of the midterms, calling the strikes the U.S. carried out in Iran on Monday, “a minor attack.” “We hit it last night, very nicely,” he said. “Not a big war.”

Mr. Trump has appeared resigned to the idea that Republicans could lose key races on the trail. He used a speech on Monday to talk about his renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and lamented that it is not uncommon for a president’s party to suffer losses in midterm elections, adding that “we gave this a very strong shot.”

In an interview published by The New York Post on Monday, Mr. Trump said he had a plan should his party lose one or both chambers of Congress.

“If that happens, I guess I’ll become ‘Mr. Veto,’” he said. “And then at some point we’ll probably make deals.”

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump appeared more optimistic, citing the enthusiasm he saw at his rallies in mostly deep red states on his 30-day barnstorm of the country. “I think the results are going to be better than you think,” he said.

Mr. Trump will host an election night “viewing reception” in the East Wing of the White House.

Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.

Cyabra reviewed discussions about six midterm races on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. Out of 274,000 posts, researchers said roughly one in nine about each race (and around 19,300 accounts out of 168,000 total) were inauthentic. Such bots also posted one in four replies to X posts from the candidates running to be governor of Georgia — Rick Jackson, a Republican billionaire, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic former mayor of Atlanta.

Real accounts can also be automated and post heavily about certain topics — especially with artificial intelligence helping produce content and distribute it — but those accounts do not mask their identity, said Keith E. Noble, a Cyabra vice president. The company, he said, uses A.I. tools to analyze hundreds of indicators of coordinated inauthentic activity, such as synchronized bursts of posts around debates and other events, multiple comments on news articles, account creation date and narrative echoes.

In Kansas, Adam Hamilton, a Democrat at the head of the largest church in the state, and Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent, are facing off for a Senate seat. One online profile weighing in on that race did not exist before April and has since posted nearly 11,000 times, sometimes 50 times a day, often at the same times.

“The story is bigger than just A.I. or automated models — you have these sock puppets, these managed personas where they’re pretending to be your neighbor next door,” Mr. Noble said. “There are human beings behind this inauthentic activity that have an agenda.”

It is unclear what — if any — effect the bots will have on the election discourse, or where they originated from. Real accounts still attracted 99.8 percent of views on X, the researchers said.

Inauthentic narratives are insidious, Mr. Noble said, spreading manufactured noise like a cancer while sowing confusion and animating anger. Other researchers have also found signs of bot manipulation in California, Texas and elsewhere. The result is a distorted sense of truth in an information environment already short on trust.

Access to A.I. tools will only make such campaigns easier to execute, he added.

“The system hasn’t built in antibodies,” he said. “It requires a different defense muscle that we’re all going to have to operate in this era because these inauthentic narrative campaigns are going to be a permanent component of our election systems moving forward.”

In Fulton County, Ga., election officials on Tuesday morning reported malfunctions of two ballot scanners that occurred in late October, during the early voting period, forcing the county to use an alternative scanning method for roughly 1,000 ballots.

And in Broward County, Fla., technical problems caused a 20-minute delay to what was scheduled to be a 7 a.m. poll opening, said Joe Scott, the county election supervisor.

Such problems, Mr. Scott said in a phone interview, are “to be expected” on Election Day. In the case of Broward, he said, the technical problem did not affect the processing of anyone’s ballot, although he said that some people who had showed up to vote first thing in the morning left polling sites before casting their ballots.

Any potential issues with voting on Tuesday are sure to be under a microscope by members of both parties after more than a year of attempts by the federal government under President Trump to exert more control over federal elections. With the president continuing to make evidence-free, false claims that the electoral process is rife with fraud, election officials across the country have grown increasingly concerned about federal interference and the possibility that innocent or benign issues on Election Day could be seized on by the president and his allies.

As news of these problems seeped online, conspiratorial messages began bubbling up. Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s most powerful aides, made note of the Westchester problems on social media, declaring, “This is how the Left steals elections.”

In another Tuesday morning post, Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and close informal adviser to Mr. Trump, wrote, “How is it that so many states are all of a sudden having ballot counting issues? Broward County. Of course. Democrats love cheating.”

Mr. Scott, the Broward elections official (and a Democrat), lamented the trend. “If anything happens with the election, people immediately go to conspiracy theories,” he said.

In New York, the state’s Board of Election said in a statement that the issue affecting voting machines in Westchester County stemmed from an adjustment to the county’s election programming that prevented the ballots from being recognized by all of the county’s voting machines except in the village of Ardsley.

Derek Tisler, a lawyer with the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program who specializes in election administration and security, said that while the situation in Westchester County appeared to be more widespread than typical glitches, it was still “well within the world of possibilities that election officials plan for.”

Voters in Westchester County were told on Tuesday morning that they could still safely fill out and submit their ballots. This note of reassurance came from a statement by Tajian M. Nelson, the Democratic commissioner of the county board of elections, and Douglas A. Colety, the Republican commissioner.

Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, wrote on social media that her office was monitoring the issue. Ken Jenkins, the Westchester County executive, said in a statement that he had directed county officials to monitor the voting process and that he would convene a bipartisan team once the issue is resolved to conduct a review of the “decisions and failures that led to this debacle.”

He said in a separate a video statement that there was no immediate need to extend the voting hours amid the issues with voting machines, though he said that candidates and campaigns had made requests to do so.

Voters in Westchester are casting ballots in several contests, including for governor and two House seats — the 16th District in the southern part of the county and the competitive 17th District in the north.

“Every ballot will be counted. Stay on line and vote,” Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican seeking re-election in the 17th District, wrote on social media. He is locked in a tight race against Cait Conley, a Democrat, who wrote: “Don’t be dissuaded and have your voice heard.”

The glitch affected the machines’ ability to scan ballots at many polling sites, according to town and county officials. Instead of feeding ballots into the machines, voters were being instructed to place them into separate, secure bags — a standard emergency protocol aimed at ensuring that voting continues without disruption.

Kathleen R. McGrath, a spokeswoman for the New York State Board of Elections, said in a statement that the impacted scanners rejected ballots they could not recognize instead of incorrectly counting them. Every valid vote would still be counted, she said, adding that “accuracy will never be sacrificed for speed.”

“While technical issues can be frustrating, contingency procedures exist for precisely these circumstances,” Ms. McGrath said. “Bipartisan election officials are diligently working to ensure every eligible voter has the opportunity to cast their ballot.”

Minor snags with voting machines happen in virtually every election and are usually resolved uneventfully. While the glitches on Tuesday appeared to worry some voters, officials said that every registered voter could be assured they would be able to cast a ballot.

Voters should not go to a different polling location, officials in the town of North Salem said on social media.

It was not clear whether the issue would extend the time it takes to count the ballots or whether technicians would be able to fix the machines before the polls close Tuesday night. Polling stations in New York are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Minor issues emerged in other places around the country, including Chester County, Pa. Officials there said they were allowing for 30-minute extensions of voting hours at three polling locations to make up for delays caused by “machine set-up issues.”

In Florida, a number of polling places had to be relocated due to flooding from intense autumn storms, with state elections officials posting the substitute voting sites online.

In Arizona, elections officials in Maricopa County announced the temporary closure of two voting centers due to “power related issues.” The news prompted James O’Keefe, the conservative activist, to write in an online post: “Time to start investigating this.”

In Austin, Texas, a fire alarm at the student union of the University of Texas at Austin was pulled, leading to brief evacuations of a popular voting location for students, according to local media reports. The Travis County clerk’s office told KXAN-TV, the local NBC affiliate, said that voting resumed after a temporary disruption, and that law enforcement were “reviewing the cause.”

There were other hints of potential Election Day dirty tricks. In Georgia, Fulton County government officials warned on Tuesday that some voters had reported receiving bogus messages “regarding polling place changes.”

County officials urged voters to verify their polling place on the state’s voter information page.

Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.