THE elderly man with a ponytail and walking stick was voting for Donald Trump—“he knows what to do with the money”—but he wasn’t happy. “It’s a sin to judge people,” he said at a polling station in Durham, North Carolina; yet the candidates had spent so much time disparaging one another. “It should be against the law to talk about each other,” he reckoned. This year’s television commercials, agreed his companion, had been the most dispiriting ever.

Particular attention falls on North Carolina today. First, because of long-running anxiety about race-based disenfranchisement, mostly but not wholly alleviated by a court ruling that found restrictions imposed by the Republican-controlled legislature had targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision”. Even after those were squashed, the NAACP and others have raised concerns about the paucity of early voting opportunities in some counties and the dubious purging of voter rolls. Somewhat obtusely, the state Republican Party put out a crowing statement that mentioned the decline of early voting among black North Carolinians compared with 2012. Then there were the worries about possible intimidation by gun-toting Trump supporters.

By mid-morning, no such problems were evident in Durham. “I didn’t get roughed up,” said one contented voter. “No Russian hackers.” Volunteers with Democracy North Carolina, which has deployed 1,300 non-partisan “vote protectors” across the state, plus hundreds of legal professionals manning a helpline, reported that several people were turned away on the grounds that they were registered in different precincts. The queue began to lengthen after a computer glitch. But there had been no hostilities or overtly partisan shenanigans. (As with other states, the Department of Justice has also sent monitors to several counties in North Carolina.)

But North Carolina is a focus for a second reason too: a swingy state that Barack Obama won narrowly in 2008 but lost in 2012, it could prove a vital prize, important enough for both candidates to visit on the final day of campaigning. At an afternoon event in Raleigh on November 7th, Mr Trump oscillated, as has become his wont, between wooden passages of autocue and freestyling stream-of-consciousness: incontinent denunciations of the media, rants about the celebrities who appeared at Mrs Clinton’ rallies, boasts about his victory in the Republican primary and impending triumphs, and a claim of responsibility for the NFL’s declining television ratings: “Everyone’s watching this,” he said, because “it’s tougher.” For some of his acolytes, this was a last chance to indulge the dark, collective thrill of yelling for a powerful woman to be locked up—the call-and-response routines seeming, at the fag-end of the campaign, part pre-scripted game show, part pagan rite. A man in a T-shirt that said “Sane Republicans Against Trump” plausibly observed—before he was thrown out by security—that Mr Trump would have won had he not been so hateful.

The crowd at Mrs Clinton’s final, midnight rally in the same city was warmed up by Jon Bon Jovi and Lady Gaga, rather than Mike Huckabee. As usual, Mrs Clinton was engaging when she allowed herself to ad-lib, less supple when she reverted to her script. She closed, in the small hours, on the story of Captain Humayun Khan, the Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, and his father Khizr Khan, emblems of Mr Trump’s prejudice that, from a long list of possibilities, her team have evidently identified as the most powerful. Bill Clinton implored her volunteers to keep working until the polls closed. In mood and demography, the two events were, as usual, drastically, incompatibly different.

Marooned on a corner of pavement outside the polling station in Durham, between the car-park and the tape marking the 50-foot exclusion zone for canvassers, the parties’ leafleteers maintained an air of civility. In a year when both sides regard the other’s candidate as not merely mistaken but degenerate and criminal, that is particularly hard: “It’s been a little nuts,” one forlornly conceded. Dee Love, a Durham estate agent, had set up a table offering refreshments to put-upon local voters, on the basis that “a cup of coffee and a nice muffin might ease some tensions”. They aren’t the only ones in need of that.