As the world awaits the US Elections 2024, the first votes cast in the small town of Dixville Notch were evenly split among the two Presidential hopefuls. Kamala Harris got three and Donald Trump got three votes in this New Hampshire town.
The first result may be a sign of a tight race to the White House, as expected.
Dixville Notch – the town near the US-Canada border in New Hampshire state – has a tradition dating back to 1960 of being the first in the United States to complete in-person voting, hours before the polls open in the rest of the country.
After a rousing accordion version of the national anthem, the town's six voters began casting their ballots at the stroke of midnight and the vote count was complete 15 minutes later, news agency AP reported. It took just 12 minutes to count the six votes in Dixville Notch, and the polling officers wrote the results on a display board.
More than 78 million people have already voted in early polling, according to a report in the New York Times, in a tight contest across the country between Harris and Trump.
In the presidential race in 2020, all five votes went to Democrat Joe Biden. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton got four votes and Trump, who eventually won the race, got two votes.
At least 66.67 per cent of the registered voters in this town are Republicans. Nikki Haley had won the primary with all six votes, though she later dropped out of the Republican race for the US President.
On Monday, Harris and Trump concluded their respective campaigns with a last push, wooing voters in battleground states that will decide the outcome of the 2024 race to the White House.
After the polling, which began on November 5 evening—according to Indian time—and is over by Wednesday morning (Tuesday night in the US), all eyes will be on early signs on which way the race is headed. These trends will not indicate who is winning but how close the fight is turning out to be and how long it will take for news outlets to announce the final winner.
The first battleground state, for example, where the polls will close is Georgia, at 7 pm, November 5 Eastern time, which is 5.30 am Indian time on November 6, Wednesday. In North Carolina, the polls end at 7:30 pm Eastern Time, which is 6 am Wednesday in India.
