US voters will choose their 47th president on Tuesday, between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, at the end of a campaign full of events and tensions.
Polls open at 6am local time (11am GMT) on the east coast of the US, where millions of people will vote, adding to the more than 80 million ballots already cast in early voting or by mail.
It is impossible to know whether the results will take hours or days to determine the winner between Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, 60, and former Republican President Donald Trump, 78, who are very different in personality and political vision.
"If she doesn't win, we're doomed. Donald Trump will destroy everything. He is out of control," said Robin Matthews, a 50-year-old union official who came to hear Kamala Harris speak in Philadelphia on Monday night.
But for Ruth McDowell, Trump is "the one who is going to save this country". The 65-year-old administrative secretary, who came to the final Republican rally in Michigan, said she would be "very sad for my grandchildren" if the vice president won.
"This could be one of the closest elections in history. Every vote counts," the Democratic nominee said Monday night in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, hours before the polls opened.
Trump vowed on Tuesday in the swing state of Michigan to "take the United States and the world" to "new heights of glory".
Whoever wins, the result will be unprecedented.
Either Americans will elect a woman to the White House for the first time, or they will elect a populist candidate convicted of criminal charges and facing multiple lawsuits, whose first term between 2017 and 2021 will plunge the country and the world into a series of ups and downs.
The latest opinion polls show a near perfect tie between the candidates in the crucial states, which will give the Democratic or Republican candidate in this indirect vote a sufficient number of electoral votes to reach the threshold of 270 electoral votes out of the 538 needed to win.
Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, will hold her campaign rally at Washington's Howard University, which is generally reserved for black students and where she did her undergraduate studies.
As for Donald Trump, he will be in Palm Beach, Florida, where he lives.
This is the end of a campaign that has seen ups and downs and surprising developments, including two assassination attempts on Trump's life and the sudden withdrawal of Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, to be replaced by Kamala Harris.
But the anticipation is not limited to the elections themselves, as anxious questions are also being asked about what will come after them, as Trump has already begun to question the integrity of the vote.
Dozens of lawsuits have already been filed by the two campaigns, while one in three Americans fears an outbreak of violence and riots after the vote.
Some polling stations were surrounded by heavy security, with drones and snipers on rooftops.
Poll workers followed drills that included how to barricade themselves in a hall or use fire extinguishers to repel potential attackers.
At least three states, Washington, Nevada and Oregon, mobilised National Guard reserves as a precaution. In Georgia, poll workers have been given panic buttons to alert authorities in case of danger.
In the nation's capital, Washington, iron barriers were erected around the White House, the Capitol and other sensitive sites. Many downtown businesses have installed wooden boards to protect their facades.
The images of 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the US Congress to prevent the certification of the results, are still fresh in people's minds.
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