In mid-October, Sade Onadiji boarded a flight from Chicago to Houston, Texas, to cast her vote for Joe Biden. She had quarantined ahead of time and gotten a Covid test. On the plane, she Clorox-wiped her seat, wore gloves, and doubled up with a N95 mask and a face shield. When she arrived at her mother’s house, she wore a mask inside and stayed upstairs for a few days before getting another test. Then she, her mom, and her brother voted together at the Smart Financial Centre.
Onadiji was born and raised in Texas and had always voted in the Houston suburbs. But this year, though she was pursuing her MBA at the University of Chicago, she decided it wasn’t the time to experiment with absentee voting. Onadiji was concerned because the state Republicans have a record of voter suppression – she pointed to Governor Gregg Abbott’s executive order that each county was only allowed a single ballot drop-off location. She went home to vote, even though it meant staying with her mother, a 64-year-old cancer survivor.
“I hate the thought that I could be exposing her or risking her health,” Onadiji said.
As coronavirus spread through the nation in the spring, polling places became another location where people could contract the virus. To avoid that during the presidential election, dozens of states expanded mail-in voting and over 85m ballots have been requested for the general election so far. Yet some voters – after being bombarded with misinformation, fearing mail backlogs and facing confusion with the process – are traveling long distances to cast their ballots in person.
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“Obviously, we’re in the midst of a pandemic,” said Irwin Aronson, a Pennsylvania lawyer who deals with election law and mail-in ballots. “Standing in line at a polling place, in close proximity to strangers, who may or may not know they have been exposed… it makes absolute sense for people to want to avail themselves of alternatives.”
Voting, whether by mail or in person, can be complicated – especially this year, when people are absentee voting for the first time and election regulations have changed due to the pandemic. According to analyses from NPR and the Washington Post, over half a million mail-in ballots were thrown out in the primaries this year for reasons including inconsistent signatures, small rips in the envelopes or missing postmarks. In the past month, thousands of ballots have already been flagged for rejection in key states like North Carolina.
Lea Zikmund, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania – a state that could decide the election – moved to New York City for work this spring. This will be Zikmund’s second time voting in a presidential election, but she’s never voted by mail before and she’s heard about ballots getting mixed up or people receiving envelopes addressed with the wrong names. She’s going to take the train back home from Penn Station – she says it’s significantly cleaner than it was pre-pandemic – and vote.
“The one big difference between mail voting and in-person voting, is when you go in person, there is a team of people there who are customer service people,” said Rachael Cobb, an associate professor of political science at Suffolk University, referring to poll workers.
In the case of Ten Francis, an urban planning graduate student in Los Angeles who votes in Florida, his primary ballot wasn’t rejected – it never arrived in the first place. “What caused me to think about [going home to vote] was the whole fiasco with the post office,” Francis said. More
