Harry's Bar in Paris drinks to US straw poll centenary

Paris – A straw poll at Harry's Bar in Paris, famous for calling US elections with uncanny accuracy, celebrates its centenary this year as Americans again flock to the drinking hole ahead of the November vote.

So long as they are US passport holders, patrons get to cast a symbolic vote at a ballot box set up at the bar in the Opera district of the French capital.

Founded in 1911, Harry's Bar claims to be Europe's oldest cocktail bar and to have invented the Bloody Mary.

Once a regular haunt of literary greats Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, actor Humphrey Bogart and jazzman Cole Porter, it still attracts famous people, such as best-selling author Douglas Kennedy who, on Monday, cast the election year's first ballot here.