National polls show both candidates in a dead heat. With voter turnout reportedly surging across the country, the next U.S. president will likely be determined by razor-thin margins in a few key battleground states.

Trump and Harris urge Americans to vote

On social media, both Trump and Harris issued rallying calls to voters as polling began. Kamala Harris, addressing Americans via X, emphasized the election’s importance, saying, “America, this is your moment to make your voice heard.”

Trump, meanwhile, took to social media with a familiar message, urging supporters to “Make America Great Again” and to “stay in line no matter how long it takes.”

 Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance casts vote in Ohio

Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance cast his ballot early this morning in Ohio, underscoring the high stakes of the election. Trump himself voted in Palm Beach, Florida, accompanied by his wife, Melania, and family members, as cameras captured the scene at his polling location.

Trump expressed optimism about the election outcome, telling reporters, “We have a great country but it’s in trouble right now – we have to fix it, and I’m confident that we will succeed by a large margin.”

Kamala Harris leads in Pennsylvania

According to recent reports from British media, Harris is currently leading in Pennsylvania, one of the pivotal battleground states. However, Trump holds narrow leads in Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona, while Harris has a slight advantage in Wisconsin and Michigan.

With 78.9 million early ballots already cast, all eyes are on these key states as both candidates aim for the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

Swing states see strong turnout

Polling has started in more than 34 states, including crucial swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona.
Turnout is reportedly high, with long lines observed in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Delays and extensions in voting hours are expected, as high turnout and technical glitches test the election infrastructure.

Voting machine issues

In Pennsylvania’s Cambria County, a software glitch in voting machines led the Board of Elections to request a court extension of voting hours from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. This delay has raised concerns about potential disenfranchisement.

“The [electronic voting system] software malfunction is jeopardizing the right of a large number of voters,” the board noted in court filings.

Bomb threat in Georgia’s Fulton county

Two polling stations in Fulton County, Georgia, were temporarily evacuated due to a bomb threat, adding to the challenges of Election Day.

Georgia election bomb threat: Poll worker arrested for sending chilling letter about concealed ‘boom toy’ – Hindustan Times

Officials have since confirmed that the threats, suspected to originate from Russian sources, were deemed false, and voting has since resumed. County officials are requesting that polling hours be extended to account for the disruption.

First vote cast in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire

As is tradition, the small town of Dixville Notch in New Hampshire kicked off Election Day voting, casting the first ballots of the 2024 election. Both Trump and Harris received three votes each, reflecting the tight nature of this race.

This New Hampshire town, located near the Canadian border, has held this tradition since the 1960s and often offers an early indicator of the nation’s mood.

Trump pledges to accept results If “fair”

After casting his vote, Trump addressed the issue of election integrity, stating he would “be the first one to acknowledge” the results if the election is fair.

However, he did not specify what he considers “fair,” and when pressed by reporters, he mentioned no plans to instruct his supporters against violence in the event of a loss, saying, “My supporters are not violent people.”

Results expected in early morning, Pakistan time

As Americans vote, those watching from Pakistan can expect early election results to start trickling in between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Wednesday, November 6, Pakistan Standard Time.

Given the extended hours for vote counting in western states, a definitive result may not emerge until later, particularly if the outcome hinges on close margins in swing states.

With early voting numbers exceeding 70 million, the outcome of the 2024 presidential race may still be days away. Each candidate will need a minimum of 270 electoral votes from a total of 538 to claim victory.

Swing states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan are expected to be pivotal, and their delayed results may extend the election’s suspense well beyond Election Day.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump battled for holdout votes over the penultimate weekend of campaigning across US swing states, with Michelle Obama to join the Democrat onstage before the Republican nominee hosts an eyebrow-raising rally in New York.

With just 10 days left in a bitterly contested presidential race, the rivals converged on Saturday on Michigan, one of the three “Blue Wall” states — along with Wisconsin and top prize Pennsylvania — that Democrats see as critical to election day victory on Nov 5.

Polls show a dead heat in the final days of the race, and with more than 38 million people nationwide already casting early ballots, Americans are deciding whether to elect the country’s first-ever woman president, or its oldest commander in chief.

Part of Harris’s strategy is to peel moderate Republicans away from an increasingly vituperative Trump, who continues to demean some Americans as the “enemy”. The ex-president still refuses to accept his defeat at the polls four years ago and is expected to reject the result if he loses again, potentially pitching the United States into chaos.

For Republican A.D. Jefferson, a 62-year-old laborer attending Harris’s rally in Houston, the Trump turmoil is too much. “I just think she’s less controversial,” he told AFP. “I’m a Republican, but I feel like Trump is just too chaotic for me.”

Beyonce, then Michelle

Fresh off a high-energy rally in Texas with pop icon Beyonce to highlight Republican restrictions on abortion, Harris heads to Kalamazoo, Michigan where she will court voters by deploying one of the Democratic Party’s most popular emissaries: former first lady Michelle Obama.

Her husband Barack Obama had joined Harris on Thursday for a rally in Georgia.

Harris, 60, campaigns on Sunday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the largest city in the largest of the swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election under the US electoral college system. She will go from neighborhood to neighborhood across the city persuading residents to cast their ballot, as she targets historically Black and Latino districts.

Trump, who swept the three Blue Wall states in his shock victory in 2016 only to see Joe Biden reclaim them for Democrats four years later, is strategizing that clawing back one or more of the trio and winning the other so-called Sun Belt swing states would propel him back into the White House.

With just a few thousands votes possibly the difference between victory and defeat in the tightest of swing states, Trump holds rallies on Saturday in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where a robust ground game and relentless barnstorming of the battlegrounds could prove decisive.

They follow the release late Friday of the extended, three-hour interview that Trump taped for the Joe Rogan Experience, America’s most popular podcast. He is seeking to woo Rogan’s massive, largely male audience, as the Republican candidate hunts for viral moments that tap into his everyman appeal.

The Trump show

Then on Sunday night, Trump performs a campaign quirk: rallying his supporters in Madison Square Garden, the iconic arena in the heart of Democrat-heavy New York.

Analysts have pondered why Trump is campaigning in his native New York despite virtually no chance of flipping the state.

The brash billionaire and onetime reality television star may be keen to orchestrate a spectacle and demonstrate he can fill an arena in a Democratic bastion.

But critics, including Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, have noted that Madison Square Garden was also the scene of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally organized by a group supportive of Adolf Hitler.

“She said it’s just like the 1930s,” Trump said at a Friday rally in Michigan, referring to Clinton’s remarks a day earlier on CNN. “No it’s not, no. This is called ‘Make America Great Again’.”

The weekend campaigning follows a heated row over accusations that the Republican ex-president has been running to be an authoritarian leader, following claims by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, echoed by Harris, that Trump is a “fascist” who cannot be trusted with power again.

Democratic White House candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday, as she aims to put pressure on Republican nominee and ex-president Donald Trump to publish his own health records.

“Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency”.

According to Simmons, her most recent physical exam, conducted in April, was “unremarkable”. Simmons noted that Harris suffers from seasonal allergies and hives, which are managed by non-prescription as well as prescription medications. She is slightly nearsighted and wears contact lenses, the report said.

“She possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency, to include those as Chief Executive, Head of State and Commander in Chief,” the doctor wrote.

The US vice president’s team seeks to put the spotlight on the physical health and mental acuity of 78-year-old former president Trump, who has so far refused to release any detailed medical information.

Republican Trump became the oldest presidential nominee in US history after 81-year-old President Joe Biden withdrew from the White House race in July.

Biden passed the torch to 59-year-old Kamala Harris after a disastrous debate against Trump raised concerns in the Democratic Party about his own mental sharpness.

Harris’s campaign drew attention to a recent series of articles in the New York Times that raised concerns about the fact that Trump had failed to disclose basic information about his health.

The newspaper also published an analysis of Trump’s language showing that his speeches are increasingly long, “confused” and include vulgarities, a trend seen by experts as a possible sign of cognitive change.

Trump insists he is fully fit, but he has not released any full medical report for his campaign.

In late 2023, Trump released a note from his former White House doctor declaring him to be in “excellent” health, but it was short on details and did not say what tests Trump had undergone when he had a physical in September 2023.

The same doctor, Ronny Jackson, issued a statement in July after Trump’s ear was wounded by an assassin’s bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania, saying the former president was doing well.

Trump, meanwhile, boasted about a cognitive test he had undergone with Jackson while president in 2018, but then immediately flubbed his doctor’s name, calling him “Ronny Johnson”.