Lhe polling stations opened this Tuesday at 6 a.m. local time on the east coast of the United States (12 p.m. Belgian time) and millions of people will add their votes to the more than 80 million ballots already cast in advance or sent by mail. postal.
It will, inevitably, be a historic result: who, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will enter the White House, at the end of a campaign of incredible tension, undecided until the last minute.
Throughout the day, polling stations will open in a growing number of states. Alaska and Hawaii will be the last to do so.
In total, some 240 million Americans are called to vote.
It is impossible to know whether it will take hours or days of counting to decide between the 60-year-old Democratic vice-president and the 78-year-old former Republican leader, whose personalities and visions could not be more different.
Whatever happens, the verdict at the polls will be historic.
Either America will send a woman to the White House for the first time. Either it will send back the populist tribune, criminally convicted and targeted by numerous prosecutions, whose first term (2017-2021) had dragged the country and the entire world into an uninterrupted series of convulsions.
The latest polls give the two adversaries almost tied in the seven crucial states, those which, in this indirect vote, will give the Democrat or the Republican the sufficient number of electors to reach the threshold of 270 out of 538, synonymous with victory.
A village of six inhabitants has already voted
Like the polls, the six voters of Dixville Notch, a hamlet lost in the forests of New Hampshire on the northeastern border of the United States with Canada, did not succeed in deciding between the candidates for the American presidential election.
This village launched the vote on Tuesday at midnight, perpetuating a tradition established since 1960, which earned it the title of “First in the Nation”.
The vote took only a few minutes, as did the counting and announcement of the results: three votes for Democrat Kamala Harris and three votes for Republican Donald Trump.
Apart from the neighboring village of Millsfield which also votes during the night, most polling stations on the east coast will open at 6:00 a.m. (12:00 p.m. Belgian time) or 7:00 a.m. (1:00 p.m. Belgian time) on Tuesday.
The electoral laws of this small northeastern state allow municipalities with fewer than 100 inhabitants to open their polling stations at midnight and to be able to close them when all the people registered on the electoral lists have voted.
In 2020, the five electors of Dixville Notch voted unanimously – for only the second time since 1960 – for Joe Biden.
