It’s Election Day in the U.S. This year, voters around the country will choose whom they want to send to the White House for the next four years. Also to be decided are 34 Senate seats, all 435 House of Representatives seats, 13 governorships and a plethora of local elected positions.
This blog will be updated throughout the night.
First polls close at 6 p.m.
The first polls to close will be in parts of Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern time. Voting locations in parts of both states that are in the Central time zone will remain open until 7 p.m. Eastern time.
At 8 p.m. Eastern time, all polls will be closed in half of the country’s states: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.
Polls stay open the latest in Alaska, where they will close at 1 a.m. Eastern time.
As of Tuesday, tracking from The Associated Press of early voting nationwide showed more than 82 million ballots were cast before Election Day, which is slightly more than half the total number of votes in the presidential election four years ago.
Still, results in many of those states will take hours, if not days, to be announced.
The presidential election is expected to come down to results in a few battleground states.
Hoax bomb threats were directed at polling locations in three of those swing states – Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, the FBI said on Tuesday. Many of the threats appeared to originate from Russian email domains, according to the FBI.
“None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far,” the FBI said in a statement, adding that election integrity was among the bureau’s highest priorities.
At least two polling sites targeted by the hoax bomb threats in Georgia were briefly evacuated on Tuesday.
Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed Russian interference.
“They’re up to mischief, it seems. They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election, and if they can get us to fight among ourselves, they can count that as a victory,” Raffensperger told reporters.
