US midterm elections: Voting machines malfunction in New York’s Westchester County

Hello there, I'm Jonah Hull and welcome to Al Jazeera's special coverage of the 2026 U.S. midterms elections live from the nation's capital. Millions of Americans are... Voting in a contest that could reshape Congress and the final two years of Donald Trump's presidency. Well, voting is now officially underway. And as the numbers come in, we'll tell you what's at stake for the control of Congress, the affordability crisis, and the global consequences of the war in Iran. We have a lineup of correspondents for you. We'll go first to Kristen Salumi, who's in Tarrytown, New York, with perhaps early voting day hiccups. Kristen, we're getting reports of issues with voting. Voting machines in Westchester County, which is where you are. What's going on? Yeah, that's right. We're in Westchester County, which is part of the 17th congressional district where there's a really close house race happening. But we've been talking to voters outside of this balloting station and also election officials, and they are indeed having some issues with the voting machines there. So when the voters get in, they get a ballot like this and they check off the candidates they want in each category. And then the ballot is put into a machine where it's scanned and the votes are tallied. Well, they're having issues with the scanning part of the vote so the they're at this stage just collecting the ballots and putting them aside to be cou nted later. But this is definitely a hiccup in the way things are supposed to be running here and it's interesting to note that the co mpany that runs these voting machines is a company called Liberty Vote. It used to be Dominion Voting Systems, which was highly criticized by President Donald Trump and his allies. They accused the company of misrepresenting votes, having partisan influence without any evidence to support them. The company, Dominion, then ended up suing. Fox News and other allies of Donald Trump over these accusations, and they received a payment of hundreds of millions of dollars, $787 million, to be exact, from Fox News to avoid going to trial on that issue. But since then, they were bought out by a Trump ally, an election official from Missouri. The company was renamed Liberty Vote. That promises election security and so on, but clearly they're having some issues here. Now, that said, I should point out that these votes are still going to be counted. Election officials are reassuring voters that they will be counted manually after everything is done. And we don't know of this issue in other districts across New York or the United States, and there are dozens that do use this system. So stay tuned, but definitely a hiccup in a very closely watched district here in New York. Kristen, thank you.