US President Donald Trump and Joe Biden have traded barbs and exhorted last-minute voters to turn out as they stump in battleground states on the final day of a polarising election campaign that has shattered early voting records.
Even as the presidential candidates made their final arguments, however, their campaigns were already laying the groundwork for post-election disputes.
Mr Trump, who is trailing in national opinion polls, has continued to lob unfounded attacks at mail-in ballots, suggesting he would deploy lawyers if states are still counting votes after election day.
His deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, says the campaign would fight any Democratic attempt to “subvert state deadlines for receiving and counting ballots”.
In response, Mr Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon reminded reporters on Monday local time that states routinely needed time after election night to finish counting votes in past US elections.
“Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on election night,” she said.
The election has already prompted an unprecedented wave of litigation over whether to adjust voting rules in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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On Monday local time, a federal judge in Texas rejected a Republican bid to throw out about 127,000 votes already cast at drive-through voting sites in the Democratic-leaning Houston area.
At a rally in Scranton in eastern Pennsylvania, Mr Trump reminded an enthusiastic crowd he won the state in 2016 despite polls suggesting he would lose and warned that election officials’ plan to count ballots up to three days after election day was a “dangerous situation”.
“You have to have a date. You can’t extend dates,” he said.
In the western Pennsylvania town of Monaca, Mr Biden told supporters the country’s future rested in their hands.
“What happens tomorrow will determine what this country will look like for generations,” he said.
Mr Trump, 74, is seeking to avoid becoming the first incumbent president to lose re-election since fellow Republican George HW Bush in 1992.
Despite Mr Biden’s national lead, the race in swing states is seen as close enough for Mr Trump to still piece together the 270 votes needed to prevail in the state-by-state Electoral College system that determines the winner.
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After visits to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, he was headed to Wisconsin and Michigan – four states he won narrowly in 2016 but that polls show could swing to Mr Biden this year.
As he has done for months, the president spoke to large crowds, where many attendees eschewed masks and social distancing despite the resurgent COVID-19 pandemic.
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Mr Biden, 77, who has made Mr Trump’s handling of the pandemic the central theme of his campaign, spoke in Ohio and Pennsylvania to much smaller gatherings.
He was set to hold an evening drive-in rally in Pittsburgh alongside singer Lady Gaga.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll in Florida, a perennial swing state, showed Mr Biden with a 50 per cent-46 per cent lead, a week after the two were in a statistical tie.
Early voting has surged to levels never before seen in US elections.
A record-setting 97.3 million early votes have been cast either in person or by mail, according to the US Elections Project.
The number is equal to 70 per cent of the entire voter turnout for the 2016 election and represents about 40 per cent of all Americans who are legally eligible to vote.
That unprecedented level of early voting includes 60 million mail-in ballots that could take weeks to be counted in some states, meaning a winner might not be declared in the hours after polls close on Tuesday local time.
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In a sign of how volatile the election could be, buildings in several cities were boarded up, including around the White House in Washington and Macy’s flagship New York department store.
Mr Trump will wrap up his campaign in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place he concluded his 2016 presidential run.
Biden is spending Election Day in Pennsylvania, with stops in Scranton, his childhood home, and Philadelphia.
-AAP
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