Early elections in the state of Florida, west of the United States, began today, Monday, at polling stations that opened their doors to voters at 7 a.m. EST, and a record turnout was recorded for the early voting process in all states, which precedes the polling day with the presidential elections scheduled for the third of next month.
Polling stations will continue to receive voters in the state of Florida until seven in the evening and until the first of November.
And 3.9 million voters cast their votes in early elections at polling stations in 2016, where their percentage exceeded 40% of the state's total electorate.
Al-Jazeera correspondent in Miami, Fadi Mansour, said that voters in Florida have the choice between voting inside the voting offices, or voting by mail by placing the voting papers in places designated for that near the voting offices.
The reporter added that Florida has 14 million voters, and more than two and a half million of them have voted so far by mail.
And Florida is one of the main states that decide the race to the White House between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, and for the southern state 29 votes in the electoral college that chooses the new president, making it with New York the largest number of votes in the pool after California and Texas in the race to capture 270 votes in the pool. It will determine the winner of the election.
According to the average of realclearpolitics polls, Biden is ahead of Trump in Florida by 1.4 percentage points.
Record turnout, and
Reuters reported that until now, a record number of voters who chose early voting across the states had registered, reaching 28 million nearly two weeks before the end of the election campaign.
Republican candidate Trump will visit Arizona state today, Monday, after he held a campaign conference in Nevada yesterday, urging his supporters to vote, amid signs of the Democrats' progress in the early vote.
As for his rival, Democratic candidate Biden - who visited another major state, North Carolina, on Sunday - he will visit his hometown of Delaware today, at a time when Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris will head to Florida to encourage his supporters to vote early.
Wajd Waqfi, Al-Jazeera correspondent in Prescott, Arizona, said that Trump will meet his supporters in a rally near the airport in Arizona, and added that Arizona is pivotal and important to him, because it is a swing state, in which Trump won the 2016 elections by a narrow margin than his rival Hillary Clinton, but the situation is different now, Opinion polls give the Democratic candidate a narrow edge of not more than 3 points.
Early voting began in Arizona on the seventh of this month, and state officials said that there is a great turnout for early voting, similar to the rest of the states.
Biden (left) is expected to meet Trump in the last election debate next Thursday (French)
Mutual criticism
and Biden harshly criticized Trump for saying over the weekend that the United States "passed the danger stage" regarding the Corona virus pandemic, indicating that the rate of new cases in the country rose to the highest level in several months.
"Things are getting worse and he's still lying to us about the (epidemic) situation," Biden said.
Despite Trump's infection with the virus and recovering from it recently, he mocked Biden, Nevada, for his cautious approach to the epidemic.
Trump mocked those calling for him to listen to the opinions of scientists, saying, "If I had only listened to scientists, we would now be in a country facing a massive recession."
The Biden campaign quickly responded, with spokesperson Andrew Bates saying, "Coronavirus cases are increasing, and layoffs are increasing."
The two rivals are scheduled to be in a final election debate next Thursday in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Presidential Electoral Debate Committee had canceled the second debate after Trump refused to participate in it because it was to be held remotely due to the president's infection with the virus and entering the two-week quarantine period.