Kira Lerner, Michigan Advance

Several prominent Republican candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election lost their races on Tuesday, but other critical races featuring election deniers have not been called.

Going into Election Day, election deniers were on the ballot in around half of the races for governor and secretary of state and one-third of the races for attorney general, according to States United for Democracy. All three statewide positions play critical roles in overseeing elections.

While election deniers have so far fared better in races for the U.S. House, aligning with former President Donald Trump and denying election results did not prove to be a good electoral strategy for statewide races to control elections. Election deniers so far have lost races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania and races for secretary of state in Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico. ...

In counties that did experience problems, which were typical of any Election Day, the incidents were largely attributed to faulty technology and human error.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the nation’s largest voting jurisdictions in a critical battleground state, election workers Tuesday morning reported issues with ballot tabulators at about 20 percent of vote centers. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates said at a news conference that the affected machines were rejecting about one ballot out of every five ballots inserted, according to Votebeat.

Officials did not initially know what was causing the issue, but technicians were dispatched to fix it. Around 2 p.m. Mountain time, Maricopa County reported that technicians changed the tabulator printer settings to produce darker markings, which resolved this issue at a number of locations. ...

A close ally of Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has a plan that she claims will help win him the election and prevent voter fraud: She wants voters to cast their ballots “as late in the day as possible” on Election Day.

Nye County, a rural enclave in Nevada, has positioned itself as the epicenter of a Donald Trump-fueled conspiracy about the security of electronic vote tabulators.

The Nye County Commission voted in March to make the county one of the first to act on the false narratives that machines that count votes are rigged. County Clerk Mark Kampf, who has falsely claimed that Trump won the 2020 election, has said that volunteer voters there will hand count the roughly 30,000 ballots expected in the November election.

Across the country, Republicans aligned with Trump have directed ire at electronic voting machines, with Republicans in at least six states introducing legislation this year to ban the use of ballot tabulators (Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, New Hampshire, Washington and West Virginia). Over 90 percent of U.S. election jurisdictions currently use electronic tabulators, with only the smallest counties opting to count votes by hand. ...