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US President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden traded criticism and urged last-minute voters to participate while conducting polls in battle states on the final day of the campaign, while Americans set records. early voting.
In Fayetteville, North Carolina, during the first of five planned rallies in four states, Republican Trump dismissed national opinion polls that showed he had lost the race and offered apocalyptic warnings about the Biden presidency.
“A vote for Biden is a vote to cede control of the government to the globalists, communists, socialists, the wealthy hypocritical liberals who want to silence, censor, cancel and punish him,” Trump said.
In Cleveland, Ohio, a state that was once seen as a blockade on Trump, Biden returned to the main issues that animated his campaign, vowing to heal the nation’s wounds while attacking Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Tomorrow we have a chance to end a presidency that has divided this nation,” Biden said, calling Trump “weak” and a “disgrace.”
Trump, 74, seeks to avoid becoming the first incumbent president to lose re-election since his Republican colleague George HW Bush in 1992.
Despite national polls showing that Biden has a wide lead, the race in the changing states is considered close enough that Trump can still muster the 270 votes needed to prevail in the state-by-state electoral college system that determines To the winner.
Read the latest on the US elections
Trump will also travel to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, all states in which he narrowly won in 2016 but which polls show he could return to Biden this year.
Biden, 77, will spend the rest of his day in Pennsylvania after his Ohio speech.
In a year disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, early voting has risen to levels never before seen in the US elections. A record 96 million early votes have been cast either in person or by mail, according to the US Elections Project.
The record number is equal to 70% of the total voter turnout for the 2016 election and represents approximately 40% of all Americans who are legally eligible to vote.
That unprecedented level of early voting includes 60 million mail-in ballots that could take days or weeks to count in some states, meaning a winner might not be declared in the hours after the polls close tomorrow night.
Twitter said today that it will attach a warning label to any tweets, including those of candidates, that claim an election victory before state election officials or national media do.
In a sign of how volatile the election could be, buildings in various cities were bricked up, including around the White House and the iconic Macy’s flagship in New York City.
The famous Rodeo Drive shopping destination in Beverly Hills is closing tomorrow, police said.
The FBI was investigating an incident in Texas when a convoy of pro-Trump vehicles surrounded a tour bus carrying Biden’s campaign personnel.
The caravan, which Trump praised, prompted Biden’s campaign to cancel at least two of its events in Texas, as Democrats accused the president of encouraging supporters to engage in acts of intimidation.
Eight state attorneys general, representing Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, warned today that they will not tolerate voter intimidation.
“Voter intimidation is illegal in every state, whether in person or from a car,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement. “People who witness disturbing behavior should immediately report it to law enforcement.”
Trump will conclude his campaign in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place where his 2016 presidential race ended.
Biden, his running mate Kamala Harris and their spouses will spend most of this day in Pennsylvania, dividing to reach the four corners of a state that has become vital to the hopes of Democrats.
Biden will rally African American voters and union members near Pittsburgh before singer Lady Gaga joins a late-night drive-in rally.
Former President Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice president for eight years, will hold a rally to get the vote in Atlanta today before an evening rally in Miami.
Biden ended his campaign on the offensive, traveling almost exclusively to the states Trump won in 2016 and criticizing the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden accuses Trump of quitting fighting the pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 Americans and cost millions of jobs. Polls show Americans trust Biden more than Trump to fight the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, has said that the first doses of an effective coronavirus vaccine will likely be available to some high-risk Americans in late December or early January.
Trump, who has often disagreed with Fauci publicly, suggested today that he might fire him after the election.
“Pick me and I’m going to hire Dr. Fauci and we will fire Donald Trump,” Biden said in Cleveland.
Trump questioned the integrity of the US election, saying that a vote count extending beyond Election Day tomorrow would be “a terrible thing” and suggested that his lawyers might get involved.
“I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait a long period of time after the election,” Trump told reporters.
Some states, including the battlefields of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, don’t begin processing mail-in ballots until Election Day, slowing down the process.
In a statement, the Trump campaign said it will combat any Democratic attempt to “subvert state deadlines for receiving and counting ballots.”
In Cleveland, Biden told voters that Trump could not stop them from exercising their rights.
“Presidents do not determine who can vote,” he said. “The voters determine who will be the president.”
Trump has repeatedly said without evidence that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, although election experts say that is rare in American elections. Voting by mail is a long-standing feature of American elections, with roughly one in four ballots cast that way in 2016.
Democrats have pushed vote-by-mail as a safe way to cast a vote this year, while Trump and Republicans boast large in-person turnout on Election Day.
Both campaigns have mobilized armies of lawyers in preparation for post-election litigation.
A federal judge in Texas today heard a Republican request to reject about 127,000 votes already cast at Democratic-leaning polling places in the Houston area.
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