Polls open across the United States this morning with Republicans holding the House 218-214 and the Senate 53-47, according to figures cited by NDTV, and with Democrats needing a net gain of four seats in each chamber to take control. More than 50 million Americans had voted before today, the Associated Press reports. The first meaningful returns arrive in the 6 p.m. Eastern hour, from Indiana and Kentucky.

The most instructive race of the day, however, may be the one whose count went to court before the votes were in.

Alaska’s Senate ballot carries two men named Dan Sullivan. One is the Republican incumbent, Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, an ally of President Trump who faces Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, in one of the handful of races expected to decide control of the Senate. The other is Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher who has done little campaigning.

On Oct. 22, the Justice Department sued to stop Alaska from certifying the result if the incumbent lost by fewer votes than the other Sullivan received, arguing that the near-identical names would confuse voters. Trump has said he directed the department to bring the case. On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason dismissed it.

“The United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified ‘investigation’ of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy,” she wrote. A federal court, she added, “lacks the authority to order that certain ballots cast by Alaskans be segregated so that federal law enforcement officials can conduct an unspecified investigation of the voters who cast them.”

Hours later, the department filed notice of appeal. A spokesperson said the court had dismissed the case “on procedural grounds but did not dispute” the government’s argument that Daniel J. Sullivan, “a/k/a Decoy Dan,” entered the race to confuse voters. That sentence is worth reading twice. A court that declines to reach an argument has not endorsed it.

Alaska’s own courts have already been through the question. Earlier this year the state Division of Elections concluded that Daniel J. Sullivan had filed his candidacy to confuse or mislead voters and removed him. A Superior Court judge reversed that decision, finding officials lacked authority to impose the “good faith” requirement they had used. In June, the Alaska Supreme Court found the division had “abused its discretion” and restored him to the ballot. Its written opinion has not yet been issued.

The incumbent has been less combative than the lawyers acting in his name. Sullivan said Sunday that he would accept the result even if he loses. Peltola has said she is “deeply offended by these accusations about having any involvement with anyone else’s candidacy.” And the U.S. attorney for Alaska said Friday that his office’s inquiry into whether Democratic operatives recruited the second Sullivan may never produce criminal charges, the New York Times reported.

Alaska counts by ranked choice, so the state will not know its senator tonight and should not pretend to. Results are scheduled for Nov. 18, with certification targeted for Nov. 25. Under state law the director of the Division of Elections certifies the winner; the governor’s signature on a senator-elect’s certificate is, in the words of an election-law expert quoted by Newsweek, typically “a ministerial act.”

Alaska is the sharpest example of a national pattern. The Justice Department says about 1,000 of its staff will monitor voting in all 50 states today, more than double the 388 it sent in 2022, focusing on populous areas, places with past problems and close districts. The monitors will not be sent to early-voting sites. In California, a federal appeals panel voted 2-1 on Oct. 30 to reject the department’s emergency bid to set aside mail ballots tied to more than 20,000 voters it suspects are noncitizens. A day later, Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote to the chief judges of the state’s four federal districts, warning that agents might seek warrants to seize ballots before California certifies its results by Dec. 11. He said he knew of no pending application.

None of that is evidence of fraud, and none of it is evidence of a stolen election. It is evidence that the weeks after the vote, the curing, counting and certifying that most voters never watch, have become a campaign of their own.

For tonight, NPR suggests watching Indiana’s 5th District, Kentucky’s 6th and Florida’s 22nd and 27th for early signs of Republican turnout. The Senate is likely to turn on six to eight races, including Republican-held seats in Ohio, Iowa, Alaska and Texas, states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Watch the margins. Then watch how the side that is behind talks about the count.

Bart De Wever went to the Royal Palace in Brussels on Monday morning and offered his resignation. King Philippe did not accept it, and he did not reject it either. The palace said the king was “postponing his decision,” would begin consulting the leaders of the coalition parties, and was “appealing to everyone’s sense of responsibility.”

The dispute is about €10 billion. De Wever’s coalition is made up of his Flemish nationalist N-VA, the Flemish socialists of Vooruit, the Flemish Christian Democrats of CD&V, the Francophone liberal MR and the centrist Les Engagés. Its leaders ended a weekend of talks early Monday without agreeing how to close the gap in next year’s budget. Belgium ran a deficit of 5.2 percent of GDP in 2025, Politico Europe reports, and the deficit is expected to rise next year.

The divide is an old-fashioned split between left and right. Vooruit, with support from CD&V and Les Engagés, wants more from those with “the strongest shoulders.” N-VA and MR resist new taxes. There were still “far too many taxes on the table,” said MR’s deputy prime minister, David Clarinval. Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot of Les Engagés said listing every sticking point would take “an eternity.”

According to RTBF, the king will meet Les Engagés and CD&V on Tuesday, Vooruit and MR on Wednesday and the N-VA’s leader on Thursday, then see De Wever again on Friday, Nov. 6.

This familiar Belgian tactic is being used more forcefully this time. Last November, facing a similar search for about €10 billion, De Wever did not resign. He asked the king for more time and received 50 days. VRT reports that the coalition agreed on €9.2 billion in savings on Nov. 24, 2025. This year he has offered his resignation. He has also ruled out the fallback of “provisional twelfths,” under which the state would spend one-twelfth of the previous year’s budget each month.

An offered resignation does not bring down a government. Until Friday, Belgium has a prime minister who has offered to quit and a king who has not accepted his resignation. The question for the week is whether the threat of collapse is worth more to De Wever than the collapse itself.

Three developments in the Iran war over the weekend all point to the period after today’s election.

First, a phone call. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Saturday about U.S. negotiations with Iran and how quickly to return to combat, according to one Israeli and one U.S. source who spoke to Axios. The sources said Netanyahu is pressing Trump to strike Iran immediately after the midterm elections. Trump, for now, wants to let negotiations play out. The Israeli source called the call “tough”; the American called it “direct.” Both governments declined to comment.

Trump’s public remarks pointed both ways. He said the talks were “going fine,” that he is not “in much of a hurry,” and that the Iranians “make a deal and then they back out.” He also said the United States still has to “take care” of one or two nuclear sites. “We can do that in 10 minutes,” he said, naming Pickaxe Mountain. Reuters has reported that Trump said the United States would not launch new attacks before the vote.

Second, a claim. On Sunday evening, the navy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said two oil tankers, one of them a supertanker, “exploded” after striking mines on what it called an “unauthorized route” through the Strait of Hormuz. It accused the ships of switching off their navigation and identification systems and sailing with American support. The statement named no vessel, flag or position, and the account could not be independently verified. Whatever happened at sea, the statement told shipping to use Iran’s approved routes.

Third, a draft. Iranian negotiators left Doha on Sunday after talks with Qatari mediators. An official briefed on the talks told Reuters that a draft proposal is circulating and that a follow-up meeting is possible. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, said no final agreement can be reached and the strait cannot be reopened “unless the US naval blockade is brought to an end.” Qatari mediators returned to Tehran on Monday evening, Reuters reported. The sides still disagree about the order of talks: Washington wants Iran’s nuclear program included from the start, while Tehran wants the blockade and its oil restrictions lifted first.

Meanwhile, Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, told the country’s top commanders on Saturday that any renewed U.S.-Israeli attack must be “met with an immediate and effective response, without geographical limitations,” according to his office.

The campaign ends tonight, but the decision about Iran does not. A proposal has not reopened the strait, a claim is not a confirmed strike, and a president who is “not in much of a hurry” has not promised to wait.

The same 1,600-bed building in Appleton, Minnesota, a small town nearly three hours’ drive from the Twin Cities, has two very different prices attached to it.

The first is $75 million. According to records obtained by KARE 11, that was the price CoreCivic quoted the State of Minnesota for the vacant Prairie Correctional Facility, “inclusive of the upgrades CoreCivic has identified would be needed to re-activate the facility.” Minnesota declined, citing the difficulty of staffing a remote prison.

The second is $495,639,588, the price the Department of Homeland Security paid CoreCivic for the same facility in August, according to SEC records cited by KARE. CoreCivic’s Aug. 5 release gave the price as $495.6 million. In the same deal, the government bought the company’s 1,033-bed Midwest Regional Reception Center in Leavenworth, Kansas, for $238.4 million. CoreCivic said it expected about $522.5 million in net proceeds after roughly $182.2 million in income taxes plus transaction costs. It said the money may go to debt reduction and repurchases of its own stock. It also expects to keep running Prairie for ICE under a management contract that expires in August 2031.

The difference is $420.6 million. CoreCivic says the two figures “measure two different things.” The $75 million “was never an appraisal or a replacement cost,” the company says, but “a preliminary number dating back to 2015.” KARE says the records show the offer was made to the state in 2025. The number is older than either headline suggests. Minnesota’s own 2018 architectural assessment of the building already listed a CoreCivic purchase price of $74.1 million. The two accounts differ on dates, but neither disputes that the state could have bought the building at roughly that price.

CoreCivic says the federal figure reflects “what it would cost to build a facility of equivalent square footage and security at today’s construction prices, less depreciation.”

That is a legitimate method if the government’s alternative is building a new prison. It fits less well for a 34-year-old prison that closed in February 2010 and stood empty for 16 years because no buyer had taken it. The 2018 state assessment estimated the cost of buying the facility and making the repairs it identified at $128.2 million, or $139 million with design fees, permits and contingencies. It also warned that the building’s layout would make security staffing expensive. Even allowing for eight years of construction inflation and stricter federal requirements, that estimate is far below $495.6 million.

Replacement cost answers the question a seller prefers: what would this be worth if it were new and you needed it built? Market price answers the question a buyer should ask: what will a willing seller accept? In this case, the seller had already named a price.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has asked congressional committees to investigate. KARE reports that CoreCivic gave $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee. That fact proves nothing about the appraisal, which has not been published. DHS should publish it. Taxpayers who paid more than six times the old asking price for a prison should be able to read the valuation.

If you want to see where the artificial-intelligence boom becomes physical goods, skip the chatbot demos and look at glass.

HOYA, the Tokyo-based maker of eyeglass lenses and endoscopes, reported on Oct. 30 that revenue for the three months to Sept. 30 rose 10.9 percent from a year earlier to ¥260.2 billion and operating profit rose 33.2 percent to ¥90.8 billion, according to its filing with the Tokyo Stock Exchange. For the first half of its fiscal year, revenue rose 13.4 percent to ¥515.9 billion and operating profit 31.6 percent to ¥173.4 billion.

The growth is concentrated. HOYA’s information and communication segment, which includes photomask blanks for chipmaking, glass substrates for hard disks and photomasks for displays, grew first-half revenue 23.1 percent to ¥207.7 billion and segment profit 27.9 percent to ¥114.5 billion. That is a margin of roughly 55 percent. The filing attributes the surge in mask blanks to development work on EUV chipmaking and a richer mix of high-end products, and the jump in disk substrates to data-center demand for nearline storage. The Life Care segment, about 60 percent of revenue, grew 8.5 percent.

Now the dry part. According to a published summary of HOYA’s earnings briefing, group revenue rose just 6.3 percent excluding currency effects, roughly half the headline figure. Disk substrates grew 32 percent, or 23 percent excluding currency effects. Endoscope sales fell 10 percent, hit by weaker markets in China and the United States. A weaker yen raises a Japanese exporter’s reported results, but that support can disappear if the currency strengthens.

This is not a knock on the business. A company whose most profitable segment earns margins above 50 percent has an obvious engine. But “AI demand” in a results release combines volume, price, product mix and exchange rates, and customer demand drives only some of those.

The same discipline applies in the United States today. Vertiv, which sells power and cooling equipment to data centers, reported on Oct. 28 that third-quarter sales rose 61 percent to $4.313 billion and organic orders more than doubled. Watch its $794 million in operating cash flow. The company says adjusted free cash flow was “partially offset by increased working capital and higher capital expenditures to support growth.” Eaton, whose electrical businesses supply the same data-center buildout, reports third-quarter results before the New York market opens this morning.

Orders are promises. Shipments are deliveries. Cash is the receipt. Read results in that order.

Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Monday that turns part of Russia’s private computing industry into a state reserve.

Under the decree, which the Kremlin published on Nov. 2, owners of non-state data centers must reserve 10 percent of their floor space and capacity so that Russian information services can keep running “in case of need.” Operators have 10 days to establish the reserve. Reuters, Meduza and Factum report that operators can keep using that capacity for now, but must hand it over within 24 hours once a new government subcommission orders it. The state will pay for the capacity, but the subcommission sets a maximum tariff, and the operator chooses neither the customer nor the price. The Digital Development Ministry must take inventory of free space nationwide. The decree also allows temporary use of data centers abroad, with the approval of the FSB, Russia’s security service.

The Kremlin’s stated justification is “unfriendly actions by certain foreign states.” The more specific reason is drone attacks. Ukrainian drones struck data centers belonging to Yandex, Sber and VK in October, Meduza reported. The Institute for the Study of War assessed on Monday that such strikes are forcing the Kremlin to invest rapidly in the physical security of its digital infrastructure. Russian forces have also attacked data centers in Ukraine.

Put plainly, data centers have become military targets. Many investors think of data centers as real estate for artificial intelligence, an asset class backed by power contracts. Russia is now treating them the way states treat fuel depots and grain silos: as strategic reserves that a government commission can seize on a day’s notice and redistribute.

The same weekend showed why. Ukraine and Russia each said their emergency-alert apps had been hacked overnight, sending false warnings of air raids and chemical and nuclear attacks, as a six-day local ceasefire in occupied Oleshky expired, Reuters reported. A state that cannot trust its own warning system wants spare computing capacity under its own control.

The decree calls the measures temporary. Ten percent is only a start, and the commission that will decide when to claim the reserve has not yet been formed. A reserve on paper is not capacity delivered, and a decree does not harden a building. But the direction is clear: every private data-center operator in Russia now knows the state can claim part of its capacity.

On Sunday, estimates suggested that a three-hour documentary about a convicted fraudster might be America’s No. 1 film. Monday’s actual figures confirmed it, by a wider margin than the estimates suggested.

“You Can See Everything,” the A24 documentary in which Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim film Elizabeth Holmes and her family starting 34 days before she reported to prison in 2023, took $11.45 million over the Oct. 30–Nov. 1 weekend, according to Box Office Mojo’s final figures. Sunday’s estimate had been about $10.6 million. Warner Bros.’ “Clayface,” in its second weekend, finished at $11.0 million after a 54 percent drop. The documentary has taken $64.7 million domestically in three weekends. It runs 174 minutes.

The wider box office was weak. All 65 reporting films combined grossed about $62 million, according to The Numbers, in what Boxoffice Pro called a slow Halloween frame. But a slow weekend can show what audiences choose when there is no blockbuster pulling them in, and they chose the long, strange film.

Here is my theory of why. This is a con-artist story told by a comedian whose work keeps asking whether sincerity can be rehearsed. In the Hollywood Reporter’s account, the film is ostensibly Holmes’s attempt to get her real story out there, “once and for all.” Fielder spends three hours testing whether a camera can certify anything at all. The title is the joke. You cannot see everything. You see what has been staged for you, and then what slips through.

That is an odd thing to sell to multiplex audiences in the week of an American election, when campaigns, networks and lawyers all claim to know exactly what voters think. I suspect it is also the appeal. Audiences like being trusted to spot the trick.

Lower on the chart, “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” jumped from 26th place to ninth as its theater count rose to 1,112, with ticket sales up more than 1,200 percent. That puts a pickpocket and a fraudster in the top ten. Make of the national mood what you like.

The industry will read the A24 number as a story about documentaries. I think it is a story about taste. Audiences want films that respect their suspicion. Studios should make more of them.

Pope Leo XIV has voted in an American election, and the Holy See Press Office announced it with doctrinal solemnity: the pope believes “in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes.” Fine. The more interesting doctrine is in the paperwork.

According to the Will County clerk’s office, Robert Francis Prevost requested a mail ballot on Oct. 3. He is registered at an address in New Lenox, Illinois, the town where his elder brother lives. NBC’s Chicago station reported that, as of Oct. 29, the clerk had not yet received his ballot; the next day the Vatican said he had submitted it. Whether it counts now depends on the same county officials, envelopes and deadlines as any other Illinois voter’s ballot. The Bishop of Rome has no more say over that than a nurse in Joliet.

This is the case for the mail ballot, made by the most visible absentee voter alive. This year mail ballots have been treated as suspect. The Justice Department went to court to set aside mail ballots tied to more than 20,000 California voters it believes are noncitizens. It lost 2-1 at the appeals court, whose ruling cited doubts about the department’s list. A filing the next day said more than four in ten flagged names could not be found on the state’s rolls. Supporters of these suits say they are defending the integrity of the count. Very well. Here is a ballot mailed from a foreign sovereign state by a man who holds more than one citizenship. If the system works for him, with the request logged, the registration checked and the vote kept secret, it works because of the procedures these lawsuits challenge, not in spite of them.

Notice what reporters could and could not find. They found that he took Republican ballots in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 primaries and Democratic ballots in 2008 and 2010, because Illinois records which party’s primary ballot a voter requests. They did not find out how he voted this time, and they will not. That line between public participation and a secret choice is the one Judge Sharon Gleason defended in Alaska on Sunday, when she refused to let federal investigators separate out ballots cast for the wrong Dan Sullivan.

I would go one step further than the Vatican. Voting is not only a duty. It is an act of trust in strangers: the clerk, the mail carrier and the person counting ballots. The pope extended that trust from Rome. The rest of us can manage it from down the street. Those who want to treat every mail ballot as evidence of a crime should explain why the system is good enough for the Vicar of Christ but not for a soldier in Germany or a grandmother in Will County.

Tonight this paper will be tempted, like every other, to say more than it knows. These are the rules we will follow, published in advance so readers can hold us to them.

A projection is not a result. When we report that a race has been called, we will say who called it and on what basis.

A lead is not a margin. In states that count mail ballots late, the early returns show the order of counting as much as the choice of voters.

A lawsuit is not a finding. A filing that alleges fraud will be reported as an allegation, with the court’s response when there is one.

A speech is not a certificate. Any candidate may declare victory. Only the officials named in state law can certify it. Alaska’s ranked-choice results are not scheduled until Nov. 18. California has until Dec. 11 to certify. We will not pretend otherwise for the sake of a headline.

A federal monitor is neither an intimidator nor a guarantee. The Justice Department says about 1,000 of its staff will watch voting today, more than double the number it sent in 2022. Some local officials fear the effect; the department calls those fears baseless. We will report what monitors actually do, not what either side predicts they will do.

That last rule depends on readers. If you vote today, work at a polling place or wait in a line that wraps around the block, write to us. Tell us the time, the place, what you saw and what you were told. We will check it before we print it, and we will tell you if we cannot confirm it. If we get something wrong on Wednesday, tell us that too. Corrections in this paper run as prominently as the original error.

We would rather be second and right than first and sorry. On a night like this, that is not caution. It is our job.