US voters cast ballots in tight race as campaign nears climax

WASHINGTON: The dizzying presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris hurtled toward an uncertain finish as millions of Americans lined up at polling stations to choose between two sharply different visions for the country.

A race churned by unprecedented events – two assassination attempts against Trump, President Joe Biden’s surprise withdrawal and Harris’ rapid rise – remained neck and neck, even after billions of dollars in spending and months of frenetic campaigning.

Trump, who has frequently spread false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election against Biden and whose supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6, 2021, voted near his home in Palm Beach, Florida. “If I lose an election, if it’s a fair election, I’m gonna be the first one to acknowledge it,” Trump told reporters. He did not elaborate.

More than 80 million Americans had already voted before Tuesday, either via mail or in person, and lines at several polling stations on Tuesday were short and orderly.

Some glitches of vote-counting technology were reported in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and a local court granted a request by election officials to extend voting hours by two hours. Two polling locations in Fulton County, Georgia, were briefly evacuated after false bomb threats.

In Dearborn, Michigan, Nakita Hogue, 50, was joined by her 18-year-old college student daughter, Niemah Hogue, to vote for Harris. Niemah said she takes birth control to help regulate her period, while her mother recalled needing surgery after she had a miscarriage in her 20s, and both feared efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict women’s health care.

“For my daughter, who is going out into the world and making her own way, I want her to have that choice,” Nakita Hogue said. “She should be able to make her own decisions.”

At a library in Phoenix, Arizona, Felicia Navajo, 34, and her husband Jesse Miranda, 52, arrived with one of their three young kids to vote for Trump.

Miranda, a union plumber, immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico when he was four years old, and said he believed Trump would do a better job of fighting inflation and controlling immigration.

Trump’s campaign has suggested he may declare victory on election night even while millions of ballots have yet to be counted, as he did four years ago.

Harris, 60, the first female vice president, would become the first woman, Black woman and South Asian American to win the presidency.