More than 100m Americans cast their ballots before election day, shattering previous records for early voting and putting the country on track for its highest voter participation rate in more than a century.
The mail-in and early ballot total, tallied on Tuesday by the US Elections Project, is equivalent to almost 73 per cent of the entire 2016 vote and means far fewer votes were up for grabs as Americans streamed to the polls on election day.
The campaigns of President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden both claimed the heavy turnout would help their candidate. Mr Trump told aides at his campaign headquarters in Northern Virginia that early tallies in Texas and Arizona were “looking really very strong”.
“Winning is easy,” Mr Trump added. “Losing is never easy. Not for me.”
Campaigning in Philadelphia, Mr Biden thanked supporters for the “incredible” turnout. “We’re going to have more people vote this year than any time in American history,” he said, speaking through a megaphone.
According to data from states that have voter registration, 45 per cent of early voters were registered Democrats, and 30 per cent were Republicans.
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign manager, said the data “really underscores how many pathways we believe we have to victory and how few Trump has”.
As Americans voted, law enforcement authorities and retailers prepared for possible unrest in several big cities. The sight of buildings being boarded up on election underscored the strangeness of the campaign, which unfolded in the shadow of a pandemic that has claimed more than 223,000 American lives and resulted in Mr Trump’s own hospitalisation with Covid-19.
In the case of a close race, the victor is unlikely to be announced on election night given that the crucial rustbelt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are not expected to complete their ballot counts in time.
Democrats hope that wins in Florida and possibly Texas, which has become a new battleground, will give Mr Biden an early and decisive victory.
But the final result could be delayed by days, or even weeks, if the race is close and Democrats fight expected legal efforts by Mr Trump and Republicans to prevent some mail-in votes from being counted.
The first polls will close at 6pm eastern time in the conservative states of Kentucky and Indiana. But the first signs from the key swing states will start to emerge after 7pm when voting ends in Georgia and parts of Florida.
The surge in early voting resulted in bottlenecks in several states. A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the US Postal Service to do a sweep of its facilities in 12 regions after the agency admitted as many as 300,000 mail-in ballots showed no sign as yet of being delivered.
The postal districts, which included locations in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and Michigan, must “ensure that no ballots have been held up”, ordered Emmet Sullivan, a federal judge in Washington DC, where the postal service is based.
Mr Trump and Mr Biden repeated their closing arguments on Tuesday, with Mr Trump defending his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the appearance at his campaign headquarters, and Mr Biden telling supporters in Philadelphia he would “rebuild the middle class”.
On the eve of the election, Mr Biden led Mr Trump by 8.1 points, according to a Financial Times analysis of polling data compiled by RealClearPolitics. He also had the edge in every swing state, except Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina. And he was neck and neck with Mr Trump in Texas, a traditionally Republican state that awards 38 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.
But his lead in some swing states was within the margin of error, raising concern among some Democrats that Mr Trump could repeat his surprise win of 2016, when some opinion polls underestimated the level of his support among white working-class voters in the rustbelt.
In recent days, Mr Trump has repeated his baseless allegation that the Democrats were trying to steal the election and warned that his lawyers would try to block the counting of absentee votes after election day.
On Monday night in Pittsburgh, Mr Biden slammed him for trying to undermine the legitimacy of mail-in ballots. “I don’t care how hard Donald Trump tries, there is nothing . . . that is going to stop the people of this nation from voting.”
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