After nearly four years of endless rallies, 34 criminal offenses, a last-minute candidate change, two assassinations and several months of crippling fear, the national fever dream of the 2024 campaign season has come to an end. Election day is just around the corner.

Voters across the country are lining up at their polling stations on Tuesday after more than 78 million Americans cast their ballots early – a significant decline from the pandemic-era flood of absentee, absentee and early voting that hampered counting in the States were clogged and results were delayed for days. Still, the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is on a knife’s edge and it could be days before a winner is announced.

Meanwhile, the candidates aren’t sitting there quietly.

Trump voted on Tuesday alongside his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, in Palm Beach, Florida, giving reporters a lengthy press conference in which he claimed he was already in the lead (though no results were released), and questioned the security of voting machines and claimed his supporters “don’t believe in violence.”

“It won’t even be close,” Trump said of the race, “but certification will take a long time.”

“It looks like we have a very significant lead,” he added without evidence. “It looks like we have a lot more Republican voters than Democrats today. If you have a lead and we have more votes, that means you are doing very well.”

Asked whether he would stop his supporters from engaging in election-related violence — as they did after the 2020 election — the former president claimed that his “supporters are not violent people” and that he “won’t say it must”. this to them.”

The former president’s claim is already contradicted by several cases of violence and intimidation by his supporters at polling stations. Arrests were made in Texas and Florida after individuals, one armed with a machete, threatened poll workers and Democratic voters. Last month, Arizona authorities arrested a man who repeatedly shot at a campaign office in Harris. On Election Day, several polling places in Fulton County, Georgia, were forced to suspend operations after officials received “not credible” bomb threats allegedly linked to Russian influence operations.

“We heard some threats that were Russian in origin,” Georgia Foreign Minister Brad Raffensperger said Tuesday. “I don’t know how to describe that this is viable – we don’t believe it is, but in the interest of public safety we are always looking at it and will continue to be very responsible when we learn about things.” .”

The danger is not just limited to polling stations. Capitol Police announced On Tuesday afternoon, they arrested a man with a flashlight and a flare gun trying to enter the Capitol Visitor Center and noticed the man smelled of fuel.

State and federal officials have warned that pressure on poll workers and volunteers could get worse as voters flock to the polls. On Monday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner invited anyone who felt it was time to “play militia” and intimidate voters or volunteers in Pennsylvania to “play around and find out.”

“We have the handcuffs. We have the prison cells. We have juries in Philadelphia and state prisons,” he said. “So if you’re trying to turn an election into any form of coercion – if you’re trying to bully people (…) then we’re not playing along. Look around and find out.”

Trump is already trying to undermine confidence in the election results. It has been abundantly clear for years that the former president will accept no outcome other than victory, and he has gone out of his way to claim fraud and influence the results since his defeat in 2020.

The army of lawyers and Republican election observers mobilized by the Republican National Committee were deployed early on Election Day. RNC co-chair Michael Whatley tweeted Tuesday morning that the RNC had “deployed our roving attorneys and worked with local officials” to ensure “poll watchers in Philadelphia, York, Westmoreland, Allegheny, Lehigh, Cambria, Wyoming, and Lackawanna Counties” were allowed to enter polling stations.

Poll watching is a time-honored tradition in American elections, but Republican leaders have made clear they plan to weaponize the practice to create a vigilante army of pro-Trump poll watchers to report suspected cases of voter fraud. The more than 170,000 Republican poll watchers trained for the election are supported by a cadre of Republican lawyers who are already filing dozens of election-related lawsuits.

Trump spent the final days of his campaign teetering between his usual appeals to authoritarianism and exhausted nihilism. During his final campaign rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, the former president described the country as a wasteland occupied by violent migrants and warned that states were agents of the federal government who could move against him to thwart what he believed was a certain victory.

In her final message to voters, Harris reiterated her campaign message of inclusivity. “As president, I promise to seek common ground and common-sense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris told supporters in Philadelphia. “I promise to listen to people who disagree with me. Because I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy. I give them a seat at the table. That’s what real leaders do. That’s what strong leaders do.”