2024-09-25 22:28:26
By Paul NOLP with Sébastien BLANC in Washington
Kamala Harris will travel to Georgia on Friday to speak about abortion rights, while in other states Americans are beginning to vote early, 45 days before the presidential election.
Rival Donald Trump will travel to Miami for a fundraising event closed to the press.
Money remains the fuel of a campaign in which candidates are expected to spend a total of $1 billion.
Since the Republican-led US Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections in June 2022, Democrats have been looking to the issue as a potential vote-getter.
And Harris is much more comfortable defending abortion rights than she is on other issues, like inflation.
On Thursday evening, the vice president insisted on this right in an event broadcast live with American television host Oprah Winfrey.
Several artists supported her during the rally-program, such as singer Jennifer Lopez and actresses Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.
It is pointless to speculate on the outcome of the election between the 78-year-old Republican and the 59-year-old Democrat, because they are neck and neck in several of the seven key states that will probably decide the result.
– To vote! –
Among these seven hotly contested electoral battlegrounds is Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 by less than 12,000 votes over the Republican billionaire.
Trump is being prosecuted in this state for allegedly exerting pressure to alter the outcome of those elections.
In Atlanta, the state’s capital and largest city, Harris will speak about the case of Amber Thurman, a woman whose death was a direct result of the consequences of a draconian anti-abortion law, according to an investigation published this week by the news site ProPublica.
In a sign that the election date is approaching, polling stations opened on Friday in Virginia, Minnesota and South Dakota, three states that offer the possibility of voting in person in advance.
The aim is to improve voter turnout by allowing people who are unable to do so due to personal circumstances to vote and by reducing crowds on election day.
Other states will follow suit in the coming days and weeks.
The US presidential election is decided by indirect voting with different variants, including postal voting, which Trump denigrates, accusing him of having encouraged alleged fraud in 2020. He has never provided evidence.
“It’s good to have early voting, to give people lots of opportunities to vote. I’m a big supporter of it, so that as many people as possible can vote,” Madison Granger, a candidate in a local district in Arlington, a city in Virginia bordering Washington, told AFP.
At another polling station, Michelle Kilkenny, 55, is delighted. “I vote to encourage people to vote. Voting early, especially on the first day, helps the campaign and increases enthusiasm,” she says.
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© Agence France-Presse
