AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST

Trump, Biden cede stage to voters for Election Day verdict

WASHINGTON (AP) — After a campaign marked by rancor and fear, Americans on Tuesday decide between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, selecting a leader to steer a nation battered by a surging pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people, cost millions their jobs and reshaped daily life.

Nearly 100 million Americans voted early and now it falls to Election Day voters to finish the job, ending a campaign that was reshaped by the coronavirus and defined by tensions over who could best address it. Each candidate declared the other fundamentally unfit to lead a nation grappling with COVID-19 and facing foundational questions about racial justice and economic fairness.

Biden entered Election Day with multiple paths to victory while Trump, playing catch-up in a number of battleground states, had a narrower, but still feasible road to clinch 270 Electoral College votes. Control of the Senate was at stake, too: Democrats needed to net three seats if Biden captured the White House to gain control of all of Washington for the first time in a decade. The House was expected to remain under Democratic control.

Voters braved long lines and the threat of the virus to cast ballots as they chose between two starkly different visions of America for the next four years. The record-setting early vote — and legal skirmishing over how it will be counted — drew unsupported allegations of fraud from Trump, who refused to guarantee he would honor the election’s result.

Fighting to the end for every vote, Biden was headed to Philadelphia and his native Scranton on Tuesday as part of a closing get-out-the-vote effort before awaiting election results in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, was visiting Detroit, a heavily Black city in battleground Michigan. Both of their spouses were headed out, too, as the Democrats reached for a clear victory.

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Huge voter turnout expected despite virus, political rancor

The scourge of a global pandemic produced an election season like no other in the U.S., persuading record numbers of Americans to cast their ballots early, forcing states to make changes to long-established election procedures and leading to hundreds of lawsuits over how votes will be cast and which ballots will be counted.

Polls were to open Tuesday as election officials warned that millions of absentee ballots could slow the tallies, perhaps for days, in some key battleground states and as President Donald Trump threatened legal action to prevent ballots from being counted after Election Day.

Amid the tumult, tens of millions of Americans heeded warnings to act early, prompted by concerns over Postal Service delays and worries about the virus spreading through crowded polling places.

“Come hell or high water,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It feels like that has been the attitude voters have needed to make sure their voices are heard this year.”

At least 98.1 million people voted before Election Day, or just shy of 71 percent of the nearly 139 million ballots cast during the 2016 presidential election, according to data collected by The Associated Press. Given that a few states, including Texas, had already exceeded their total 2016 vote count, experts were predicting record turnout this year.

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Election Day shadowed by threats of legal challenges

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even before Election Day, the 2020 race was the most litigated in memory. President Donald Trump is promising more to come.

The candidates and parties have enlisted prominent lawyers with ties to Democratic and Republican administrations should that litigation take on a new urgency if a narrow margin in a battleground state becomes the difference between another four years for Trump or a Joe Biden administration.

Since the 2000 presidential election, which was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, both parties have enlisted legal teams to prepare for the unlikely event that voting wouldn’t settle the contest. But this year, there is a near presumption that legal fights will ensue and that only a definitive outcome is likely to forestall them.

A Pennsylvania case at the Supreme Court pits Donald Verrilli, who was President Barack Obama’s top Supreme Court lawyer, against John Gore, a onetime high-ranking Trump Justice Department official.

Trump said this weekend he was headed to court to prevent Pennsylvania from counting mailed ballots that are received in the three days after the election. An extension was ordered by Pennsylvania’s top court. The Supreme Court left that order in place in response to a Republican effort to block it.

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Control of Senate at stake as Trump's allies face Democrats

WASHINGTON (AP) — Control of the Senate is a razor-close proposition in Tuesday's election, as Republicans fight to retain their majority against a surge of Democratic candidates confronting the president's allies across a vast political map.

Both parties see paths to victory, and the outcome might not be known on election night.

From New England to the Deep South, the Midwest to the Mountain West, Republican senators are defending seats in states once considered long shots for Democrats. Washington’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, the economic fallout and the nation's uneasy mood are all on the ballot. Stunning amounts of cash have been flowing to Democrats from millions of Americans apparently voting with their pocketbooks; Republicans are tapping deep-pocketed donors to shore up GOP senators.

President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden swooped in on key states important to the Senate as they propelled their own campaigns in a final stretch.

Securing the Senate majority will be vital for the winner of the presidency. Senators confirm administration nominees, including the Cabinet, and can propel or stall the White House agenda. With Republicans now controlling the chamber, 53-47, three or four seats will determine party control, depending on who wins the presidency because the vice president can break a tie.

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EXPLAINER: A long night, or more, before president is known

WASHINGTON (AP) — There’s a good chance Americans won’t know the winner of Tuesday’s presidential election when they go to bed that night.

The main reason? Many states have made it easier to request a mail ballot amid the coronavirus pandemic and concerns about crowded polling places. But mail ballots generally require more time to process than ballots that are cast in person.

DIFFERENT STATES, DIFFERENT APPROACHES

Some states with extensive experience in using mail-in ballots have adjusted for those extra steps.

In Florida, clerks can start counting ballots 22 days before an election. In North Carolina, beginning five weeks before the election, county boards insert approved ballots into a voting machine, allowing for a prompt tabulation on Election Day.

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Hospitals competing for nurses as US coronavirus cases surge

FENTON, Michigan (AP) — As the coronavirus pandemic surges across the nation and infections and hospitalizations rise, medical administrators are scrambling to find enough nursing help — especially in rural areas and at small hospitals.

Nurses are being trained to provide care in fields where they have limited experience. Hospitals are scaling back services to ensure enough staff to handle critically ill patients. And health systems are turning to short-term travel nurses to help fill the gaps.

Adding to the strain, experienced nurses are "burned out with this whole (pandemic)” and some are quitting, said Kevin Fitzpatrick, an emergency room nurse at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan, where several left just in the past month to work in hospice or home care or at outpatient clinics.

“And replacing them is not easy," Fitzpatrick said.

As a result, he said, the ER is operating at about five nurses short of its optimal level at any given time, and each one typically cares for four patients as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge anew. Hospital officials did not respond to requests for comment.

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It's here: What to watch on Election Day in America

Election Day is finally here.

Or at least what we still call Election Day, since nearly 100 million Americans had already cast ballots by Tuesday. That's the result of an election system that has been reshaped by the worst pandemic in a century, prompting many voters to take advantage of advance voting rather than head to polling places in person at a time when coronavirus cases are rising.

Here's what to watch as the final votes for President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are cast:

WHAT DO AMERICANS WANT FROM A PRESIDENT?

Elections are always about where Americans want to steer the country. That’s especially true this year as the U.S. confronts multiple crises and is choosing between two candidates with very different visions for the future.

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5 dead in Vienna attack; assailant had previous conviction

VIENNA (AP) — Five people died, including an assailant, and 17 others were wounded in a shooting in the heart of Vienna hours before a coronavirus lockdown started, Austrian authorities said Tuesday. The dead attacker was a 20-year-old Austrian-North Macedonian dual national who had a previous terror conviction.

Two men and two women died from their injuries in the attack Monday evening, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said. The suspected attacker was shot and killed by police.

Vienna’s hospital service said seven people were in life-threatening condition Tuesday after the attack, the Austrian news agency APA reported. In total, 17 people were being treated in hospitals, with gunshot wounds but also cuts.

“It is now confirmed that yesterday's attack was clearly an Islamist terror attack," Kurz said. “It was an attack out of hatred — hatred for our fundamental values, hatred for our way of life, hatred for our democracy in which all people have equal rights and dignity.”

Interior Minister Karl Nehammer later told APA that the dead assailant, who had roots in the Balkan nation of North Macedonia, had a previous conviction under a law that punishes membership in terrorist organizations.

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Turkish rescuers pull girl from rubble 4 days after quake

IZMIR, TURKEY (AP) — Even as hopes of reaching survivors began to fade, rescuers in the Turkish city of Izmir pulled a young girl out alive from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building on Tuesday, four days after a strong earthquake hit Turkey and Greece.

Wrapped in a thermal blanket, the girl taken into an ambulance on a stretcher to the sounds of applause and chants of “God is great!" from rescue workers and onlookers.

Health Media Fahrettin Koca identified her as 3-year-old Ayda Gezgin on Twitter and shared a video of her inside the ambulance. The child had been trapped inside the rubble for 91 hours since Friday's quake struck in the Aegean Sea and was the 107th person to have been pulled out of collapse buildings alive.

Rescuer Nusret Aksoy told reporters that he was sifting through the rubble of the toppled eight-floor building when he heard a child's scream and called for silence. He later located the girl in a tight space next to a dishwasher.

The girl waved at him, told him her name and said that she was okay, Aksoy said.

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Powerful Hurricane Eta threatens flooding in Central America

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — Dangerously powerful Hurricane Eta churned toward Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast with potentially devastating winds, while heavy rains thrown off by its storm bands already were causing rivers to overflow across Central America.

The Category 4 hurricane had sustained winds of 150 mph (240 kph), and the U.S. National Hurricane Center said it was likely to maintain that strength until making landfall Tuesday. It was centered about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, around 4 a.m. and moving west-southwest at 5 mph (7 kph). Hurricane-force winds were already blowing on land.

Authorities in Nicaragua and Honduras moved people from outer islands and low-lying areas to shelters. Residents scrambled to shore up their homes, but few structures along Nicaragua’s remote Caribbean coast were built to withstand such force.

Nicaragua’s army moved red-helmeted troops specialized in search and rescue to Bilwi, the main coastal city in an otherwise remote and sparsely populated area. The navy spent Monday ferrying residents of coastal islands to shelters in Bilwi, also known as Puerto Cabezas.

The government said more than 3,000 families were taken to shelters from the most at risk areas.