Dixville Notch first to vote on Election Day!
Washington/Philadelphia/Grand Rapids, Nov 5 (EFE).-
US presidential candidates, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, tied early Tuesday morning in the New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch, historically the first in the country to vote on Election Day.
Six voters in Dixville Notch cast their ballots at midnight: three for Trump and another three for Harris, a tie that seems to support the polls showing very narrow margins in the most important states.
In 2020, incumbent president Democrat Joe Biden, won in Dixville Notch by five votes to zero, and the results of the last elections there have been relatively aligned with the national trend.
The tradition of voting in the first minutes of the election day in this area of the northeast of the US dates back to 1960.
Meanwhile, polling stations in the rest of the country will begin to open early Tuesday morning and will start to close at 6 pm Eastern Time. If the margins are very small, as expected, the country may have to wait days for recounts and to tabulate all the ballots in the most competitive states.
Dixville Notch voted after Trump and Harris closed out Monday with a marathon day of electoral events.
Trump toured North Carolina (Raleigh), Pennsylvania (Reading and Pittsburgh) and Michigan. In the latter, he chose the town of Grand Rapids, the same in which he concluded his previous two presidential races: in 2016, the year in which he defeated Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when he lost to Biden.
Harris, on the other hand, concentrated her efforts on a single state, Pennsylvania, with events in Scranton, Allentown, Pittsburgh and finally Philadelphia, where she had as a backdrop the Museum of Art whose steps were made popular by Sylvester Stallone in the film “Rocky.”
Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and Oprah Winfrey, among others, accompanied Harris in her final rally, while the opening acts at Trump’s were not well known and mainly local politicians.
The spectacular nature of the Democratic stage also contrasted with the modesty of Grand Rapids’ Van Andel Arena where the Republican held his.
The two candidates need the votes of 270 of the 538 delegates of the Electoral College to be declared the winner, but the race is mostly played out in seven swing states: Pennsylvania (19 delegates), North Carolina (16), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (6).
Harris looks to have secured the support of 226, so she needs only 44, and Trump starts with 219, according to CNN forecasts.
The average of polls carried out by the FiveThirtyEight website gives Harris a 1.2 point lead, with 48 percent voting intention, but in swing states that margin calls into question that hypothetical victory. In Pennsylvania the two are tied and in North Carolina Trump is ahead by just one point.
The possibility of violence has prompted the country to protect its electoral centers and important buildings such as the White House, while some businesses and restaurants have also boarded up their entrances.
The Republican leadership still refuses to accept the 2020 results and has once again raised the specter of fraud this year. On Monday, the Republican National Committee, for example, sued the Milwaukee electoral commission over the city’s plan to reduce the presence of observers.
Some 244 million Americans are called to the polls, and 80 million of them exercised their right to vote early, according to the University of Florida’s count.
This brings to a close an unprecedented campaign, in which Biden’s stepping down was accompanied by two assassination attempts against Trump, who in turn made history due to his court trials – two of them, in Washington and Georgia, over trying to reverse the 2020 election results, and another in New York where he was found guilty of falsifying business records. EFE
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