Early voting kicks off in crucial US states amid high-stakes

The election race in the USA has started. Residents of three states – Minnesota, Virginia, and South Dakota – can already vote in the presidential elections. Americans have several ways to cast their vote.

On Friday, Virginia residents were the first to cast their votes in this year's presidential election. Even then, long queues of voters formed around Counties Stafford, Prince William, and Fairfax offices, which lie on the outskirts of Washington. This state was once a Republican stronghold, but now the Democrats have the upper hand there.

However, this is not the only way to cast a vote. State residents can send votes by post, submit postal votes to local offices or drop them into specially designated boxes. Voting in this mode will end three days before election day – 2 November.

Along with the presidential elections, elections to the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate occur. In many states, residents will also elect governors and local parliaments.

On Friday, a similar voting process started in "Republican" South Dakota and Minnesota, the latter of which has a governor who is the Democratic Party's candidate for vice president, Tim Walz.

This week, residents of North Carolina and Pennsylvania will receive their ballots. In these states, the process has been delayed due to legal complaints by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy endorsed Trump in the election and demanded his name be removed from the ballots.

Residents of Alabama have already received their postal ballots, but early in-person voting is not allowed. Early voting in Illinois and Mississippi will start next week.

Although early voting and postal voting have long been part of the electoral process in the USA, they were associated in 2020 with massive controversies due to Donald Trump's accusations. The Republican candidate baselessly suggested that they were mechanisms allowing for voter fraud.

Democratic Senator and former vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine, when asked whether he feared a repeat of this scenario, said that while he did not expect such problems in Virginia, similar turmoil could occur in other states where the contest is fierce, including Georgia.

In Manassas, voters Kaine and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Senator Mark Warner encouraged early voting. They pointed out the enthusiasm among the party's electorate and noted that the election race would be very close. However, they warned against interference in the elections from Russia and Iran.

The Senator, who is also seeking re-election, admitted that he is concerned about the attempts of America's enemies to influence the electoral process. “We've got all of these new artificial intelligence tools, deepfakes being one example, but a whole host that allows you to spread disinformation, misinformation at speed and scale that's unprecedented. So I said [we’re less prepared for election interference in 2024 than 2020], I put those words out, and I think we got people's attention. We just won't know though how successful we are probably until late in the election because generally speaking, foreign entities will launch their efforts quite close to the actual voting date,” he said.

Kaine believes that although Harris is winning by a significant margin in Virginia, minimal differences in votes in the seven most closely contested states will decide the victory.