Getting the 2024 presidential Election Day underway after midnight early Tuesday, Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, split the vote 3-3 between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, setting up a razor-thin election.
The tiny resort town has a tradition that dates back to 1960 for being the first in the nation to complete in-person voting. The town's six voters cast their ballots at the stroke of midnight.
President Joe Biden won all five votes in the 2020 presidential election, showing how Trump has flipped some votes from Democrats back to him — albeit on the smallest of scales.
To a gathered crowd of journalists, the vote opened with a rendition of the U.S. national anthem performed on an accordion. Electoral laws in New Hampshire allow municipalities with fewer than 100 residents to open their polling stations at midnight and close them when all registered voters have fulfilled their civic duty.
Dixville Notch's residents voted unanimously for Biden in 2020, reportedly only the second presidential hopeful to get all the votes since the midnight voting tradition began in 1960.
Dixville Notch voters handed a surprise unanimous victory to Republican White House hopeful Nikki Haley in New Hampshire's primary in January. Haley later quit the race due to an insurmountable Trump lead.
American voters deliver their verdict Tuesday after an extraordinarily turbulent election that will either make Harris the first woman president in U.S. history or deliver Donald Trump a comeback that sends shock waves around the world.
As the first polling stations opened on Election Day, Democrat Vice President Harris, 60, and Republican former President Trump, 78, were dead even in the tightest and most volatile White House race of modern times.
The bitter rivals spent their final day of the campaign frenetically working to get their supporters out to the polls and trying to win over any last undecided voters in the swing states expected to decide the outcome.
Despite a series of head-spinning twists in the campaign — Trump riding out two assassination attempts and a criminal conviction to Harris' dramatic entrance when President Joe Biden dropped out in July — nothing has broken the deadlock in the opinion polls.
Polling stations opened at 6 a.m. ET on the U.S. East Coast and tens of millions of voters are expected to cast their ballots, on top of the more than 82 million people who have already voted early in the preceding weeks.
A final outcome might not be known for several days if the results are as close as the polls suggest, adding to the tension in a deeply divided nation.
And there are fears of turmoil and even violence if Trump loses, and then contests the result as he did in 2020, with barriers erected around the White House and businesses boarded up in Washington.
The world is anxiously watching, as the outcome will have major implications for conflicts in the Middle East, for Russia's war in Ukraine, and for tackling climate change — which Trump calls a hoax.
Harris and Trump were effectively tied in the seven main swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
On the eve of the vote, Harris went all in on the must-win state of Pennsylvania, rallying on the Philadelphia steps made famous in the "Rocky" movie and declaring: "Momentum is on our side."
However, "this could be one of the closest races in history — every single vote matters," cautioned Harris, who was joined by celebrities including Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Trump, who would become the first convicted felon and oldest person to win the presidency, cast himself as the only solution to an apocalyptic vision of the country in terminal decline and overrun by "savage" migrants.
"With your vote tomorrow, we can fix every single problem our country faces and lead America — indeed, the world — to new heights of glory," Trump told his closing rally in Grand Rapids in the key swing state of Michigan, after touring North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Harris meanwhile hammered home her opposition to Trump-backed abortion bans across the United States — one of her key vote-winning positions with crucial women voters.
But she also struck an upbeat note, and notably avoided mentioning Trump, after weeks of targeting him directly as a threat to democracy.
A Trump comeback would be historic: Just the second-ever nonconsecutive second term for a U.S. president, since Grover Cleveland in 1893.
A Harris victory would give the U.S. its first Black woman and South Asian president.
Trump has said he would not seek election again in 2028.
Information from The Associated Press and Agence France Presse was used to compile this report.