[Source: Reuters]

The dizzying presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris hurtled toward an uncertain finish on Tuesday as millions of Americans lined up at polling stations to choose between two sharply different visions for the country.

A race churned by unprecedented events – two assassination attempts against Trump, President Joe Biden’s surprise withdrawal and Harris’ rapid rise – remained neck and neck, even after billions of dollars in spending and months of frenetic campaigning.

Trump, who has frequently spread false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election against Biden and whose supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6, 2021, voted near his home in Palm Beach, Florida. “If I lose an election, if it’s a fair election, I’m gonna be the first one to acknowledge it,” Trump told reporters. He did not elaborate.

More than 80 million Americans had already voted before Tuesday, either via mail or in person, and lines at several polling stations on Tuesday were short and orderly.

Some glitches of vote-counting technology were reported in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and a local court granted a request by election officials to extend voting hours by two hours on Tuesday night. Two polling locations in Fulton County, Georgia, were briefly evacuated after false bomb threats.

In Dearborn, Michigan, Nakita Hogue, 50, was joined by her 18-year-old college student daughter, Niemah Hogue, to vote for Harris. Niemah said she takes birth control to help regulate her period, while her mother recalled needing surgery after she had a miscarriage in her 20s, and both feared efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict women’s health care.

At a library in Phoenix, Arizona, Felicia Navajo, 34, and her husband Jesse Miranda, 52, arrived with one of their three young kids to vote for Trump.

Miranda, a union plumber, immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico when he was four years old, and said he believed Trump would do a better job of fighting inflation and controlling immigration.

Reuters/Ipsos polling shows Harris leading among women by 12 percentage points and Trump winning among men by seven percentage points.

The contest reflects a deeply polarized nation whose divisions have only grown starker during a fiercely competitive race. Trump has employed increasingly dark and apocalyptic rhetoric on the campaign trail. Harris has urged Americans to come together, warning that a second Trump term would threaten the underpinnings of American democracy.

Control of both chambers of Congress is also up for grabs. Republicans have an easier path in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats are defending several seats in Republican-leaning states, while the House of Representatives looks like a toss-up.