Election Day 2024 arrived Tuesday — with tens of millions of Americans having already cast their ballots. Those include record numbers in Georgia, North Carolina and other battleground states that could decide the winner.
The early turnout in Georgia, which has flipped between the Republican and Democratic nominees in the previous two presidential elections, has been so robust — over 4 million voters — that a top official in the secretary of state’s office said the big day could look like a “ghost town” at the polls.
As of Monday, Associated Press tracking of advance voting nationwide showed roughly 82 million ballots already cast — slightly more than half the total number of votes in the presidential election four years earlier. That’s driven partly by Republican voters, who were casting early ballots at a higher rate than in recent previous elections after a campaign by former President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee to counter the Democrats’ longstanding advantage in the early vote.
Despite long lines in some places and a few hiccups that are common to all elections, early in-person and mail voting proceeded without any major problems.
That included in the parts of western North Carolina hammered last month by Hurricane Helene. State and local election officials, benefiting from changes made by the Republican-controlled legislature, pulled off a herculean effort to ensure residents could cast their ballots as they dealt with power outages, lack of water and washed out roads.
By the time early voting in North Carolina had ended on Saturday, over 4.4 million voters — or nearly 57% of all registered voters in the state — had cast their ballots. As of Monday, turnout in the 25 western counties affected by the hurricane was even stronger at 59% of registered voters, state election board Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said.
Brinson Bell called the voters and election workers in the hurricane-hit counties “an inspiration to us all.”
Besides the hurricanes in North Carolina and Florida, the most worrisome disruptions to the election season so far were arson attacks that damaged ballots in two drop boxes near the Oregon-Washington border. Authorities there were searching for the person responsible.
The absence of any significant, widespread problems has not stopped Trump, the Republican nominee, or the RNC, which is now under his sway, from making numerous claims of fraud or election interference during the early voting period, a possible prelude to challenges after Election Day.
He has mischaracterized an investigation underway in Pennsylvania into roughly 2,500 potentially fraudulent voter registration applications by saying one of the counties was “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person.” The investigation is into registration applications; there is no indication that ballots are involved.
In Georgia, Republicans sought to prohibit voters from returning mailed ballots to their local election office by the close of polls on Election Day, votes that are allowed under state law. A judge rejected their lawsuit over the weekend.
Trump and Republicans also have warned about the possibility that Democrats are recruiting masses of noncitizens to vote, a claim they have made without evidence and that runs counter to the data, including from Republican secretaries of state. Research has consistently shown that noncitizens registering to vote is rare. Any noncitizen who does faces the potential of felony charges and deportation, a significant disincentive.
One case of noncitizen voting was caught during early voting last month and resulted in felony charges in Michigan after a student from China cast an illegal early ballot.
This is the first presidential vote since Trump lost to Joe Biden four years ago and began various attempts to circumvent the outcome and remain in power. That climaxed with the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to halt certification of the results after Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell.”
Even now, a solid majority of Republicans believe Trump’s lie that Biden was not legitimately elected, despite reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states that all affirmed Biden’s win. A survey last month from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed Republicans remain much more skeptical than Democrats that their ballots will be counted accurately this year.
Seeking to rebuild voter confidence in a system targeted with false claims of widespread fraud, Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states since 2020 have passed new voting restrictions. Those rules include shortening the window to apply or return a mail ballot, reducing the availability of ballot drop boxes and adding ID requirements.
On the last weekend before Election Day, Trump continued to falsely claim the election was being rigged against him and said a presidential winner should be declared on election night, before all the ballots are counted.
Vice President Kamala Harris urged voters not to fall for Trump’s tactic of casting doubt on elections. The Democratic nominee told supporters at a weekend rally in Michigan that the tactic was intended to suggest to people “that if they vote, their vote won’t matter.” Instead, she urged people who had already cast ballots to encourage their friends to do the same.
Through four years of election lies and voting-related conspiracy theories, local election officials have faced harassment and even death threats. That has prompted high turnover and led to heightened security for election offices and polling sites that includes panic buttons and bullet-proof glass.
While there have been no major reports of any malicious cyberactivity affecting election offices, foreign actors have been active in using fake social media profiles and websites to drum up partisan vitriol and disinformation. In the final weeks, U.S. intelligence officials have attributed to Russia multiple fake videos alleging election fraud in presidential swing states.
On the eve of Election Day, they issued a joint statement with federal law enforcement agencies warning that Russia in particular was ramping up its influence operations, including in ways that could incite violence, and likely would continue those efforts well after the votes have been cast.
Jen Easterly, the nation’s top election security official, urged Americans to rely on state and local election officials for information about elections.
“This is especially important as we are in an election cycle with an unprecedented amount of disinformation, including disinformation being aggressively peddled and amplified by our foreign adversaries at a greater scale than ever before,” she said. “We cannot allow our foreign adversaries to have a vote in our democracy.”
American voters deliver their verdict Tuesday after an extraordinarily turbulent election that will either make Kamala Harris the first woman president in US history or deliver Donald Trump a comeback that sends shockwaves around the world.
As polling stations open nationwide on Election Day, Democratic vice president Harris, 60, and Republican former president Trump, 78, are dead-even in the tightest and most volatile White House race of modern times.
The bitter rivals spent their final day of the campaign frenziedly working to get their supporters out to the polls and trying to win over any last undecided voters in the swing states expected to decide the outcome.
But despite a series of head-spinning twists in an unprecedented campaign -- from Harris's dramatic entrance when President Joe Biden dropped out in July, to Trump riding out two assassination attempts and a criminal conviction -- nothing has broken the deadlock in the opinion polls.
Polling stations open at 6:00 am (1100 GMT) on the US east coast and tens of millions of voters are expected to cast their ballots, on top of the more than 82 million people who have already voted early in the preceding weeks.
A final outcome may not be known for several days if the results are as close as the polls suggest, adding to the tension in a deeply divided nation.
And there are fears of turmoil and even violence if Trump loses, then contests the result as he did in 2020, with barriers erected around the White House and businesses boarded up in Washington.
The world is meanwhile anxiously watching as the outcome will have major implications for conflicts in the Middle East, for Russia's war in Ukraine, and for tackling climate change -- which Trump calls a hoax.
'Every single vote matters'
Harris and Trump are effectively tied in the seven main swing states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
On the eve of the vote, Harris went all-in on the must-win state of Pennsylvania, rallying on the Philadelphia steps made famous in the "Rocky" movie and declaring: "momentum is on our side."
However "this could be one of the closest races in history -- every single vote matters," cautioned Harris, who was joined by celebrities including Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Trump -- who would become the first convicted felon and oldest person to win the presidency -- cast himself as the only solution to an apocalyptic vision of the country in terminal decline and overrun by "savage" migrants.
"With your vote tomorrow, we can fix every single problem our country faces and lead America -- indeed, the world -- to new heights of glory," Trump told his closing rally in Grand Rapids in the key swing state of Michigan, after touring North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Harris meanwhile hammered home her opposition to Trump-backed abortion bans across the United States -- one of her key vote-winning positions with crucial women voters.
But she also struck an upbeat note -- and notably avoided mentioning Trump, after weeks of targeting him directly as a threat to democracy for his dark rhetoric and repeated threats to exact retribution on his political opponents.
A Trump comeback would be historic -- the first non-consecutive second term for a US president since Grover Cleveland in 1893 and just the second ever.
Trump's return would instantly fuel international instability, with US allies in Europe and NATO alarmed by his isolationist "America First" policies. Trading partners are nervously watching his vow to impose sweeping import tariffs.
A Harris victory meanwhile would give the US its first Black woman and South Asian president -- and signal an end to the Trump era which has dominated US politics for nearly a decade.
Trump has said he would not seek election again in 2028.
However, the Republican still refuses to admit he fairly lost the 2020 election to Biden and the trauma over his supporters' violent attack on the US Capitol to stop certification of the result remains heavy.
Trump has hinted that he would refuse to accept another loss, and in the final days of the campaign brought up baseless claims of election fraud while saying he should "never have left" the White House.
