Atlanta. Americans began casting ballots on Tuesday in an Election Day unlike any other, braving the threat of COVID-19 and the potential for violence and intimidation after one of the most polarizing presidential races in U.S. history.
In and around polling places across the country, reminders of a 2020 election year shaped by the pandemic, civil unrest and bruising political partisanship greeted voters, although more than 90 million ballots have been already submitted in an unprecedented wave of early voting.
Many wore masks to the polls — either by choice or by official mandate — with the coronavirus outbreak raging in many parts of the country.
After a summer of nationwide protests against police violence and racism, businesses in several major U.S. cities were again boarded up as a precaution against unrest, an extraordinary sight on Election Day in the United States.
In Atlanta, Georgia, about a dozen voters were lined up before sunrise at the Piedmont Park Conservancy. First in line was Ginnie House, shivering in the cold, waiting to cast a vote for the Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a former vice president seeking to replace President Donald Trump, a Republican, in the White House.
“I lost my absentee ballot and I’m not going to miss this vote,” said House, a 22-year-old actor and creative writing student in New York who had flown back just for this purpose. Of Trump, she said: “He’s dividing our country.”
In Hialeah, a predominantly Cuban suburb of Miami, Marcos Antonio Valero, 62, was voting for Trump, as he had done in 2016, and said he took the day off from his job as a construction worker to cast his ballot in person because he did not trust voting by mail.
He made no prediction as to which way Florida, a closely fought battleground state, would tip.
“It’s a secret, a mystery,” he said. “No one knows how it’s going to end until we all know.” – Reuters
