Decision day
Voters in US brave long lines, threat of virus to cast ballots
After a campaign marked by rancor and fear, US voters were expected on Tuesday to decide between President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden, selecting a leader to steer a nation battered by a surging pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people, cost millions their jobs and reshaped daily life.
Nearly 100 million people in the United States have voted early and now it falls to election day voters to finish the job, ending a campaign that was reshaped by the coronavirus and defined by tensions over who could best address it.
That figure, including more than 35 million in-person votes and nearly 63 million returned mail-in ballots, represents more than 71 percent of the total votes in the 2016 general elections.
Biden entered election day with multiple paths to victory while Trump, playing catch-up in a number of battleground states, had a narrower, but still feasible road to clinch the 270 Electoral College votes to win the White House.
Voters braved long lines and the threat of the virus to cast ballots as they chose between two starkly different visions of America for the next four years.
The election day voting kicked off in the morning with first ballots cast in Dixville Notch and Millsfield, two small towns in the northeastern state of New Hampshire.
Voters were choosing their preferred candidates for US president and New Hampshire governor, as well as federal and state legislative seats in the midnight voting, a tradition that began in 1960.
In the makeshift “Ballot Room” at Dixville Notch’s Balsams Resort, Les Otten, one of only five local registered voters, cast the first ballot.
Otten, identifying himself as “a lifelong Republican”, said that he is voting this time for the Democratic presidential nominee Biden.
“I don’t agree with him on a lot of issues,” Otten said of Biden in a video posted on social media before the voting. “But I believe it’s time to find what unites us as opposed to what divides us.”
In Dixville Notch, the other four votes also went to Biden, while residents in Millsfield voted 16 to 5 in favor of Trump.
Top battleground states
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 percentage points nationally, but only by 2.8 percentage points in top battleground states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
Trump made campaign stops in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on Monday, while Biden traveled to Ohio during the day and Pennsylvania.
Stores in cities across the country — from Fifth Avenue in New York to the nation’s capital to Beverly Hills in California — are boarding-up windows, while extra police are set to be deployed in case of violence over election results on Tuesday.
Along Fifth Avenue, at least 45 luxury stores have been boarded up, including jeweler Tiffany & Co. A spokesperson for Tiffany said in a statement: “Out of an abundance of caution, the windows of select stores in key cities will be boarded in anticipation of potential-election related activity.”
The boarding-up of storefronts was also underway in downtown Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Houston and other cities.
States have different rules on when they are allowed to start counting mail-in ballots, which hit record volumes this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic and require more time to process than those cast in person.
Election officials and experts have said that the country should be prepared not to know who won the White House on Tuesday night.
The race came as the country is reeling from COVID-19 with more than 9.2 million cases and more than 230,000 deaths reported as of Monday, both the highest in the world.