US election 2024 as it happened: Polls open across American east coast as race tightens between Trump, Harris; Republicans lead in Arizona early voting

Good evening, and thanks for tuning into our live US election blog. You can jump across here to our Wednesday blog to keep reading.

Before you go, here are some highlights from today.

• Former president Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris spent the campaign’s final hours focused on the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
• Trump crossed three states on the final full day of campaigning, beginning in North Carolina, heading to Pittsburgh in the all-important state of Pennsylvania.
• In his speeches, Trump painted a bleak picture of a nation “destroyed” under the Biden-Harris administration. He blended false claims about voter fraud with warnings about migrants committing crimes and personal attacks on his rivals, including Harris who he referred to as having a low IQ on several occasions.
• He also threatened Mexico with a 25 per cent tariff on all imports in a move to curb illegal immigrants coming into the US.
• Meanwhile, Harris criss-crossed Pennsylvania, with rallies in the two major left-leaning cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
• In her addresses, she claimed momentum was on her side, and it was time to deliver a fresh start. She focused on optimism about the future and avoided mentioning Trump by name.
• She attempted to court Gen Z voters and doubled down on her support for Puerto Rico after a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a Donald Trump rally in New York last week.
• The FBI bolstered security ahead of the vote, including by setting up a 24/7 election command post to monitor and respond to security threats that may arise during the week. The agency has already warned Americans about fake election videos circulating on social media.
• A poll worker in Georgia was arrested after allegedly making a bomb threat in a letter purporting to be from an aggrieved voter.

• An early voting booth also descended into violence when an irate voter punched an election official in the face in Illinois.

Thanks again for joining us – again, here is Wednesday’s blog so you can keep reading there.

It has passed 7am on the US east coast, which means the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, and – perhaps most crucially – Pennsylvania, are now open for voting.

Both candidates finished off their campaigns in Pennsylvania and have spent considerable time in the other two swing states in the neck-and-neck presidential race.

Election worker Sean Vander Waal prepares to open a polling booth in Dearborn, Michigan.Credit: AP

Here’s a quick recap of why these three states are important:

• Pennsylvania: It has the highest number of Electoral College votes of the seven swing states, at 19, meaning whoever wins the Keystone state is handed a significant advantage. Trump recently said: “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing.” One of the “blue wall states”, it went to the Democrats in the six elections before Trump won it in 2016, then it went to Joe Biden in 2020. In the run up to the election, Farrah Tomazin wrote about the state being “the centre of the US political universe”.
• Georgia: Last election it went to the Democrats for the first time in more than 30 years. For years, it was one of safest Republican strongholds in US, but it has become increasingly urban, and the growing number of black, Latino, Asian and Pacific American voters has had an effect. It was also ground zero for Trump’s alleged election fraud conspiracy, where he and several others are still facing trial. Here is Farrah’s report from Georgia last week.
• Michigan: Went to Trump in 2016 after nearly 30 years of being held by Democrats, before going back to them with a Biden victory in 2020. However, with a significant concentration of Arab-Americans, it has been at the centre of a backlash over the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza conflict over the past year. Farrah filed this report from Michigan on October 25.

All three states feature prominently on the likely paths to victory for both Harris and Trump.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have both taken to social media tonight to urge Americans to get out and vote as polling stations open across the east coast.

“America, this is the moment to make your voices heard,” Harris posted, encouraging followers to visit the I Will Vote website “to find everything you need to cast your ballot today”.

Soon after, she posted: “Election Day is here. Today, we vote because we love our country and we believe in the promise of America.”

Trump took to his Truth Social platform about four hours ago, writing as usual in caps.

“A GREAT DAY IN NORTH CAROLINA, PENNSYLVANIA, AND MICHIGAN – THANK YOU! IT’S TIME TO GET OUT AND VOTE – SO TOGETHER, WE CAN MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” he wrote

Earlier, the rivals finished their campaigning with opposing visions of how to unify a divided nation, but both chose to spend their final hours focused on Pennsylvania, the swing state with the most Electoral College votes.

While Trump painted a bleak picture of a nation “destroyed” under the Biden-Harris administration, his Democratic rival’s message was one of unity and “a fresh start”.

On the US east coast it’s just past 6.30am, when polls opened in North Carolina, one of the crucial swing states that could hand the winner the presidency.

As US correspondent Farrah Tomazin reported recently, September’s Hurricane Helene has become a political flashpoint in North Carolina, a fast-growing, racially diverse state that Trump won by only 1.3 per cent in 2020 – his narrowest margin of victory that year.

Donald Trump kicked off the final day of the presidential campaign with a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina on Monday.Credit: Getty Images

How that natural disaster will affect voter turnout in the hours ahead is the big question.

What makes North Carolina such an important battleground is that it has 16 electoral college votes up for grabs, which is a fairly big haul on the path to the White House.

Polling stations also opened at 10pm AEDT in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire and Virginia, while booths across parts of Maine, Indiana and Kentucky are also now open to voters.

Earlier, the residents of the tiny New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch cast their ballots at midnight, local time.

If the result of the six-person vote was anything to go by, it will be a tight contest, with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris trying 3-all.

According to CNN, four Republicans and two undeclared voters participated in the ballot, and while the result won’t forecast the winner, it provides an early taste of what’s to come as the country wakes up.

Les Otten, one of the voters, described the novel process as “a civics lesson for the country.”

“If we can help people get out and understand that voting is an important part of their right as an American citizen, that’s perhaps the key to what we’re doing,” he said

US intelligence officials have warned of Russian plans to interfere in the election – both on polling day and in the days and weeks afterwards, spreading false information that risks inciting violence against election officials.

Amid existing fears of violent attacks in the event Donald Trump loses, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Infrastructure Security Agency released a joint statement ahead of the ballot warning of foreign efforts to stoke division and hostility among voters.

“Russia is the most active threat. Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instil fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences,” the statement said.

“These efforts risk inciting violence, including against election officials. We anticipate Russian actors will release additional manufactured content with these themes through election day and in the days and weeks after polls close.”

The agencies said one example of fraudulent material posted by Russian operatives was an article falsely claiming that US officials across swing states plan to orchestrate election fraud using a range of tactics, such as ballot stuffing and cyberattacks.

“Iran also remains a significant foreign influence threat to US elections. As noted in a prior update, we have assessed that Iran has conducted malicious cyber activities to compromise former president Trump’s campaign,” the statement said.

The agencies recommended voters seek out information from trusted, official sources – in particular, state and local election officials.

Arizona Republican Senate nominee Kari Lake is adamant a “silent majority” of Americans will elect Donald Trump to the White House.

According to CNN reports, Lake used her final campaign rally in Prescott, Arizona, to encourage supporters to change the trajectory of the United States and “save this republic”.

Lake, who did not concede her 2022 election loss and promoted Trump’s false theories about the 2020 election, said she believes in “fair and honest elections” and argued the “Founding Fathers never envisioned we’d have elections that are run so horribly”.

Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake at a campaign rally.Credit: AP

“That’s why they never put in term limits because they figured we’d be able to vote the people that we didn’t respect out of office. And unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do that,” Lake said.

“And we’re going to change that after January. But the only way to change that is to show up in such a massive movement that we have their heads spinning.”

Philadelphia: Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump have closed out one of the most chaotic presidential campaigns in history with opposing visions of how to unify a nation at loggerheads over everything from abortion rights to immigration and election integrity.

As millions of Americans head to the polls, both candidates spent the campaign’s final hours focused on Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral college prize out of the seven swing states that will ultimately decide who becomes the next president.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.Credit: AP

While Trump painted a bleak picture of a nation “destroyed” under the Biden-Harris administration, his Democratic rival’s message was one of unity and “a fresh start”.

Tuesday’s election is the first to take place after the January 6 attack at the US Capitol and the first to take place after Trump’s conservative judges on the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights – an issue that continues to resonate among female voters.

America is bracing for potential violence and unrest if Trump doesn’t win the election, with shops in DC boarding up windows and doors as the former president amplifies claims of rigged ballots and lays the groundwork to challenge the outcome if Harris defeats him.

Read Farrah Tomazin’s full story here.

Southern India might be almost 14,000 kilometres away from Washington but in the tiny village of Thulasendrapuram, the locals are praying for Kamala Harris.

There’s little to distinguish the village from any other rural community in Tamil Nadu, except its connection to the woman who could become America’s first leader with South Asian roots.

A woman in the hometown of Kamala Harris’ grandfather in India.Credit: AP

Harris’ maternal grandfather was born in Thulasendrapuram, about 350 kilometres from the city of Chennai, more than 100 years ago. As an adult, he moved to Chennai, where he worked as a high-ranking government official until his retirement.

Harris has never visited Thulasendrapuram and she has no living relatives in the village, but people here still venerate the family that made it big in the US.

They talk about her at the local tea shop. Banners and billboards bearing her face are seen throughout the community.

“Our deity is a very powerful God. If we pray well to him, he will make her victorious,” said M Natarajan, the temple priest who led the prayers in front of the image of Hindu deity Ayyanar.

Other than trips during her childhood, Harris hasn’t visited India much – particularly not since becoming vice president – but she has often spoken emotionally about her ties to her late mother’s country of birth.

AP

Palm Beach, Florida: Donald Trump closed his campaign with false claims about election fraud and Kamala Harris’ crowd sizes, but it was the Republican nominee who spoke in partly empty arenas as both candidates crossed the finish line.

The former president crossed three states on the final full day of campaigning, beginning in North Carolina, heading to Pittsburgh in the all-important state of Pennsylvania (where Harris spent the entire day) and finishing, as is his tradition, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he spoke for two hours.

Preparations for Donald Trump’s election night watch party.Credit: Michael Koziol

Trump has always measured success by TV ratings and crowd sizes, but he appeared to struggle on those indicators as the campaign drew to a close. Reporters on the ground relayed that Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, was about 70 per cent full, and the upper stands at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh were cordoned off and empty.

Trump is due to head home to Florida, where he will appear alongside aides, family and friends for an election watch party at the Palm Beach County Convention Centre in West Palm Beach, a short drive from his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Preparations were in overdrive earlier in the day, with two traffic lanes on the busy road outside the centre closed to traffic as workers erected temporary fencing and bollards. Media crews from around the globe were camped on the lawns outside, speaking to camera and setting the scene.

Many reporters have been denied access to the event due to what the Trump team says are capacity constraints, and will have to cover it from a spillover area nearby. But there was no one around to stop this masthead from taking a sneak peek inside the building on Monday evening (Tuesday AEDT).

Read Michael Koziol’s full report here.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has fired a warning shot for anyone planning to interfere with the election in the battleground state and threatening them with the full weight of the law.

During a public address on Tuesday (AEDT), Krasner reassured voters in the city that authorities had been working for months to ensure those heading to the polls could cast their ballots safely.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.Credit: AP

“Anybody who thinks it’s time to play militia, ‘F around’ and find out. Anybody who thinks it’s time to insult, to deride, to mistreat people, ‘F around’ and find out,” Krasner said.

“We do have the cuffs, we do have the jail cells, we do have the Philly juries and we do have the state prisons. So if you’re gonna try to turn an election into some form of coercion, if you’re gonna try to bully people, bully votes or voters, you’re gonna try to erase votes, you’re gonna try any of that nonsense, we’re not playing. ‘F around’ and find out.”