Ballot scanners across Westchester County in New York refused to read ballots for much of Election Day on Tuesday, leaving voters in one of the state's most closely watched suburbs to drop their filled-out ballots into sealed emergency bags. County Executive Ken Jenkins said up to 250,000 ballots at 332 polling places in more than 40 communities were affected.

Trouble surfaced right at the 6 a.m. start of voting when up to 300 machines began turning ballots away. Jenkins first pointed to the way a vendor printed the ballots. The New York State Board of Elections gave a different explanation. It said programming was updated for Election Day voting in a single municipality after the equipment had already been prepared and tested, while scanners in the rest of the county kept the older setup and could not recognize the new ballots.

State officials stressed that the machines rejected ballots outright instead of counting them wrong. The board promised every valid vote would be counted. Jenkins called the breakdown completely unacceptable and told residents he was just as angry as they were. He said he will bring in a bipartisan team to review what went wrong.

Ballots wait in orange bags

Poll workers are sealing completed ballots in orange bags kept under bipartisan watch. Because they are now handled as emergency ballots they cannot be counted until polls close at 9 p.m. Eastern time and officials said voting hours will not be extended. Crews worked to get at least one scanner running again at every polling place, moving town by town from the northern end of the county with more machines due back as the day went on.

The failure hit a county of more than 1 million people with two congressional races on the ballot. Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who is defending the 17th District against Democrat Cait Conley, told voters to stay in line and cast their ballots. Conley also urged people not to give up. Gov. Kathy Hochul called it a glitch and said every vote will be counted. Her Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman told voters not to leave without voting while Attorney General Letitia James said her office is monitoring the situation.

Heavy turnout and scattered snags

Outside New York the day brought long lines and strong numbers. In Georgia the top election official reported 775,000 votes cast so far with turnout expected to reach about 1.4 million by the close. In Florida 7.22 million of the state's 13.6 million eligible voters had taken part by 3 p.m. Eastern time once early ballots were included.

Other places ran into problems of their own. Broward County in Florida fixed machines that wrongly told some early morning voters they had the wrong ballot. In Mississippi a voting rights group said machines were down across much of Jackson County with more trouble reported in Hinds and DeSoto counties. One Gulf Coast polling site briefly had no paper ballots either. The secretary of state's office reported late openings and heavy traffic on its election hotline. The Justice Department sent about 1,000 monitors and observers to polling sites around the country in what it called the largest such effort in its history.

First results roll in

The first official numbers came from Guam, where Republicans led by Vicente Ada won the governor's office and Democrat Alicia Limtiaco captured the territory's nonvoting seat in Congress. On the mainland the first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern time in parts of Kentucky and Indiana.