Georgia and Wisconsin are hoping to bounce back from their problematic primaries earlier this year with another round of voting concluding Tuesday.
Both states have made adjustments since their first elections held during the coronavirus pandemic, but reports at midday from voting rights groups show some issues still remain. While the crowds at polling places were smaller, voters reported machine malfunctions and confusion over where they could cast a ballot in person.
Tuesday's elections were another indicator of what could happen in November, on a much larger scale, if states are not prepared and voters are not informed of changes.
Four other states — Connecticut, Minnesota, South Dakota and Vermont — had voting Tuesday, but no major problems were reported. These are the details in the two battleground states hoping to make their second rounds of primaries less problematic than the first.
Georgia
Unlike the June 9 primary, polling locations across the state did not have the same long lines due to the lower-turnout runoff election and increased use of absentee ballots. But malfunctioning voting machines remained an issue for those voting in person — particularly for those in Floyd, Gwinnett, Chatham and Fulton counties, which take in much of the Atlanta region and Savannah.
After buying new voting machines for every polling place in the state last year, Georgia has seen operational problems with them for three consecutive elections, which does not bode well for the presidential election, when the contest for Georgia's 16 electoral votes now looks to be a tossup.
"Georgia continues to fail voters by not ensuring these machines are up and running. This is gravely concerning for November," said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which monitors an election hotline for voters.
Tuesday's runoffs were conducted in 94 of Georgia's 159 counties, including the five most populous. Voters will determine who moves on to the general election in four congressional districts — there were a pair of runoffs in each party — as well as contests for dozens of seats in the General Assembly, a range of trial court judges and various county offices.
Turnout in November is expected to exceed 5 million.
To streamline mail ballot processing, the State Elections Board made two emergency rule changes Monday in preparation for a surge in absentee voting this fall. The first will allow election administrators to process, but not tabulate, mail ballots up to two weeks before Nov. 3. The other is the creation of an online portal, expected to launch within the next week, for voters to request absentee ballots.
Wisconsin
On April 7, last-minute election changes caused widespread confusion and chaos during primaries for president and a range of state offices, including a pivotal seat on the state Supreme Court. A shortage of poll workers in Milwaukee meant only five of the 180 polling locations were open, causing hours-long wait times — and widespread fear that the fight for Wisconsin's crucial 10 electoral votes would be severely tainted.
But for Tuesday's legislative and congressional primaries, the state's largest city had 95 percent of its usual polling locations open for in-person voting — and as a result wait times were not an issue, at least by the middle of the afternoon. The National Guard is also on standby in case of any staffing shortages.
There were fewer mail voting issues this time, but as of Tuesday morning more than 9,600 absentee ballots had yet to be delivered to voters who had requested them. And nearly 342,000 mail ballots that were delivered had not yet been returned. The state Elections Commission said voters who have not yet returned their absentee ballots must do so at their municipal clerk's office before the polls close at 8 p.m. in order to be counted.
Voting rights groups reported that some Wisconsinites were confused about where they could drop off their mail ballot or cast one in person due to lack of proper signage at polling locations and elections offices.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.