ELECTION Day voting kicked off in the United States early yesterday morning with first ballots cast in Dixville Notch and Millsfield, two small towns in the northeastern state of New Hampshire.

Voters were choosing their preferred candidates for U.S. president and New Hampshire governor, as well as federal and state legislative seats in the midnight voting, a tradition that began in Dixville Notch in 1960.

In the makeshift “Ballot Room” at Dixville Notch’s Balsams Resort, Les Otten, one of the only five local registered voters, cast the first ballot.

Otten, identifying himself as “a lifelong Republican,” said he is voting for Democratic presidential nominee and former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who is challenging sitting President Donald Trump.

“I don’t agree with him on a lot of issues,” Otten said of Biden in a video posted on Twitter before the voting. “But I believe it’s time to find what unites us as opposed to what divides us.”

The other four votes in Dixville Notch also went to Biden, while residents in Millsfield voted 16 to five in favor of Trump.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 percentage points nationally, but only by 2.8 percentage points in top battleground states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona.

Polling stations in some major cities on the East Coast were scheduled to open as early as 6 a.m. yesterday local time. Then polls  opened across the nation. The final polls would close in Alaska.

Voters have cast more than 98 million ballots ahead of Election Day, according to the latest tally from the U.S. Elections Project. That figure, including more than 35 million in-person votes and nearly 63 million returned mail-in ballots, represents more than 71 percent of the total votes counted in the 2016 general elections.

States have different rules on when they are allowed to start counting mail-in ballots, which record high volumes this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic and require more time to process than those cast in person. Election officials and experts have said that the country should be prepared not to know who won the White House on the day.

Besides the Trump-Biden race, all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate would be in play yesterday. More than a dozen state and territorial governorships, among many other state and local posts, will also be contested.

The 2020 U.S. elections, including presidential and congressional races, come as the country is still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic with over 9.2 million cases and more than 230,000 deaths reported as of Monday evening, both the highest in the world.

Moreover, many voters are worried by the reality of an increasingly divided nation suffering from bitter partisan fights, violent racial conflicts and worsening social injustice.

(Xinhua)