US election results live updates: Donald Trump v Kamala Harris in the battle for the White House

• Kamala Harris and Donald Trump face off in a closely contested 2024 US presidential election.
• Key swing states include Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
• Early voting has seen about 75 million ballots cast, indicating a potential historical turnout.

It’s judgment day for United States Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in what polls suggest will be one of the closest contests in modern American history.

There is little daylight between the fierce rivals in the handful of critical states framing the 2024 race. Yet under the United States’ unusual Electoral College voting system, it would take only a small swing in a few key states to hand either Harris or Trump a big victory.

With candidates needing 270 of the 538 electoral votes to win, elections tend to be decided in the hotly contested “swing states” with a history of alternating between Republican and Democratic candidates.

The critical swing states expected to decide this election are Pennsylvania (19 Electoral College votes), Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (6).

You can keep up-to-date with all the latest results on our live blog below.

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So far Americans are voting with determination, with roughly 75 million people having cast ballots in the early voting period.

In North Carolina, nearly 4.5 million voters set an early in-person voting record in the state amid devastation from Hurricane Helene. Georgia voters also set a record with 4 million voters casting an early ballot. In Pennsylvania, 1.7 million people voted by mail amid increasingly caustic litigation over whose mail ballots should count. Nine states have seen more than 50% of eligible voters already vote.

Projections from early voting indicate that the overall turnout for the election will probably be between the roughly 60% of eligible voters who turned out in 2016 and the two-thirds of eligible voters who voted in 2020, according to Michael McDonald, a professor of politics at the University of Florida who tracks voting. While overall turnout is likely to be slightly lower than the modern high-water mark set in the 2020 election, it still puts the country on pace for a historical high compared with almost all other previous years.

With swathes of Americans nervous about nearly every aspect of the electoral process, officials across the country have mounted a furious effort to shore up the election, including by introducing new protections for their own safety.

Much of their worry stems from the violent culmination of the 2020 presidential race at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This year, former President Donald Trump is working from a familiar playbook, spreading falsehoods about the election and claiming that Democrats are “a bunch of cheats”.