The last polling station in the US presidential election has closed. The media is giving former President Donald Trump a better chance of winning than his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as the final ballots are counted.
People in Adak, a small town in the western part of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, could vote until 1am Eastern Time (6am GMT). Geographically, this part of the state is closer to Russia than to the mainland US. It added in-person voting as an option in 2012, giving the roughly 250 residents the distinction of possibly being the last participants of national elections. Three electoral votes are at stake in the state.
Residents enjoy being the last people in the country to cast their votes, city manager Layton Lockett told AP, even though with the rest of the country already done by that time, “realistically everybody knows the election’s decided way before we’re closed.”
The state of Hawaii closed its polling stations an hour earlier.
Stations in nine precincts in eastern Arizona were kept open for two extra hours on Election Day. Apache County Superior Court Judge Michael Latham ordered this after malfunctioning equipment and a lack of printed ballots threw a wrench into the electoral process.
Trump is widely expected to secure more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win, following his victories in the swing states of North Carolina and Georgia.