Photos via Voice of America.
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International news
Published on Tuesday, November 5, 2024 By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Millions of U.S.
voters visited polling stations Tuesday
to pick a new president, deciding
whether to elevate Vice President Kamala
Harris to become the country’s first female
leader or return former President Donald
Trump to the White House that he lost in
the 2020 election. According to a report
published by Voice of America Journal, polls show that
Harris, the Democratic candidate, and
Trump, her Republican challenger, are
locked in one of the closest contests in
decades, with the winner to begin a
four-year presidential term in January. Political analysts
say the national outcome is likely to be
determined by the vote in seven
political battleground states spanning
the country, where surveys show the two
candidates are within 2 percentage
points of each other, what pollsters
describe as a toss-up. Depending on how
close the vote is, and how fast the vote
counting is in key states, a likely
winner could emerge by late Tuesday or
early Wednesday, but maybe not for
several days, as occurred four years
ago. Both Harris and
Trump have assembled a vast roster of
experienced election lawyers to contest
any irregularities they believe might
affect the outcome to their candidate’s disadvantage. Polls started
opening early Tuesday across the country’s eastern states,
with people streaming in to vote at
government centers, fire stations,
schools, churches and elsewhere. Other
polling stations were to open later
across the country’s six time zones. Trump, 78, spent
the early hours of Election Day in the
political battleground state of
Michigan. He wrapped up his campaign
with a late-night rally in Grand Rapids,
a Republican stronghold where he also
ended his 2016 and 2020 runs for the
presidency. “We’re in very good
shape. I have to tell you, we’re way up in terms
of the vote,” Trump declared in
a post-midnight speech. He claimed that
Harris and the Democrats could only win
if they cheat. “They have to cheat,
and they do, and they do it very well,” Trump contended.
He blamed Harris, as he has throughout
the campaign, for high consumer prices
and the influx of undocumented migrants
across the Mexican border into the
United States. Trump, who cast
his ballot in person Tuesday, is
spending the day at his Mar-a-Lago
estate in Florida. He is scheduled to
hold an election result watch party in
West Palm Beach on Tuesday night. Harris, 60, ended
her campaign at a star-studded rally in
the eastern city of Philadelphia on
Monday night, with pop star Lady Gaga,
musical groups and former talk show
host Oprah Winfrey lending their
support. Harris did not
mention Trump in her remarks, telling
the crowd, estimated at 30,000, that “tonight, we finish
as we started, with optimism, with
energy, with joy, knowing that we the
people have the power to shape our
future.” Harris plans to
attend an election night party at Howard
University in Washington, a historically
Black university where she graduated
with a degree in economics and political
science in 1986. Harris said Sunday that
she had “just filled out” her mail-in ballot
and it was “on its way to
California,” her home state. Both candidates
made stops Monday in Pennsylvania, with
19 electoral votes, the biggest prize
among the seven battleground states.
They held a series of rallies, with both
showing up in Pittsburgh, in the heart
of the U.S. steel-making region. Both
Harris and Trump expressed optimism. “The momentum is on
our side,” Harris told her
supporters gathered at a historic steel
facility. “Our campaign has
tapped into the ambitions, the
aspirations and the dreams of the
American people. And we know it is time
for a new generation of leadership in
America.” “We must finish
strong,” Harris added. “Make no mistake,
we will win.” Trump, addressing
his supporters at a sports arena, said
another presidential term with him at
the helm would “launch the most
extraordinary economic boom the world
has ever seen.”
“If
you vote for Kamala, you will have
four more years of misery, failure and
disaster,”
Trump
claimed.
“Our
country may never recover. Vote for me
and I will deliver rising wages,
soaring income, and a colossal surge
of jobs, wealth and
opportunity for Americans of every
race, religion, color and
creed. Every one of them." Ahead
of Tuesday’s
Election Day, more than 83 million
Americans cast early votes, either in
person at polling stations or by mail. The
total is more than half the 158
million who voted in the 2020 election,
when President Joe Biden defeated
Trump. It was a Democratic victory
that to this day Trump says he was
cheated out of by fraudulent voting
rules and vote counts. Dozens
of court decisions, often rendered by
Trump-appointed judges, went against
him as he attempted to challenge the
2020 results. On Sunday, he told a
Pennsylvania rally he
“shouldn’t
have left”
the
White House in 2021 when Biden assumed
office. Trump
has said he will only accept Tuesday’s
outcome if he concludes that the
election is conducted fairly, which
Democratic critics have said they
assume means only if he wins. A
Trump victory would make him only the
second president to serve two
non-consecutive terms, after Grover
Cleveland in the 1880s. He would also
be the first felon to serve as
president as he awaits sentencing
later in November after being
convicted of 34 charges linked to his
hush money payment to a porn film star
ahead of his successful 2016 run for
the presidency. Trump
has often punctuated his campaign with
angry broadsides at his Democratic
opponents, calling them the
“enemy
within”
the
country and a threat to the country’s
future. He has belittled Harris as a
person of limited intellect and said
she would be the pawn of other world
leaders in dealing with international
relationships. Harris
for weeks has claimed she is the
underdog in the campaign but lately
expressed more optimism and now says
she expects to become the country’s
47th president. If elected, she would
be the first woman to be the
American
leader, its
first
of South Asian descent and
its second Black president after
Barack Obama. She
has described Trump as an
“unserious
man,”
saying
he would be a threat to American
democracy and unhinged by any normal
presidential constraints after the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this
year that presidents cannot be
prosecuted for any wrongdoing linked
to their official actions. Pollsters
say the country’s
voters are deeply divided between the
two candidates. It is an assessment
reflected in how major media outlets
look at the possible outcome. Last-minute
polling shows the Harris-Trump race
all but tied in the battleground
states. The
importance of the battleground states
cannot be overstated. U.S.
presidential elections are not decided
by the national popular vote but
through the Electoral College, which
turns the election into 50
state-by-state contests, with 48
states awarding all their electoral
votes to the winner in those states.
Nebraska and Maine allocate theirs by
both statewide and congressional
district vote counts. The
number of electoral votes in each
state is based on population, so the
biggest states hold the most sway in
determining the overall national
outcome, with the winner needing 270
of the 538 electoral votes to claim
the presidency. Aside
from the 19 electoral votes at stake
in Pennsylvania, and
two other battleground states, Georgia
and North Carolina,
have 16 apiece, and Michigan has 15. Polls
show either Harris or Trump with
substantial or somewhat comfortable
leads in 43 of the states, enough for
each to get to 200 electoral votes or
more. Barring an upset in one of those
states, the winner will be decided in
the seven remaining battleground
states.
Voice of America
Journal, VOA, is a U.S. government
news agency funded by the U.S.
Congress.
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