‘I’ve never felt so frightened’: Philadelphia voters turn out record numbers, defying Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots and voter intimidation fears

Nadine Boyd should be celebrating. At 78-years-old, she has just performed her civic duty by voting in the presidential election at her local polling station here in west Philadelphia. She did it a month before election day, without having to queue.

But there’s something playing on her mind.

“I hope it counts. I believe it will, but there’s so much going on, it may not,” she says, as her voice drops lower and more serious. “I believe — don’t make me say it now — but I believe Trump’s got more up his sleeve. He’s always got something like that.”

This race for the White House in 2020 is not a normal election. It is taking place in the midst of a pandemic, at a time of heightened polarisation and rising political violence. Above all, at a time when the very act of voting is under attack from the White House.

Boyd voted early for a reason. As the coronavirus has caused states to implement new rules for voters to cast their ballots safely, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have launched an unprecedented effort to limit these measures across the country, often citing bogus claims of fraud.

But all of these attacks may have had an unintended effect in Philadelphia, at least as far as the Trump campaign is concerned: They have scared people into voting early.

Boyd says she was spooked by the delays in the postal service, which the president had tried to hobble in his effort to limit mail-in ballots. Her prescriptions were getting delayed, and she didn’t want the same to happen to her vote.

“My vote got here on time. I didn’t want no post office holding it up. I brought it here myself,” she says. “Am I confident [it will be counted]? No. So many crooked things are happening. But I did my part.”

It’s the same story across the city: a number of Philadelphians interviewed by The Independent report that they do not have faith their vote will be counted for the first time in their lives.

Sandy Dean, a senior voter, came to Philadelphia’s main election office in downtown to drop off her mail-in ballot with her own hands rather than send it by post.

“I’m so afraid of it not getting counted that I wanted to get it in right away,” she says. “Our so-called president has instilled this fear. I’m terrified that our whole process will be broken.”

“I was voting during the McCarthy period. I’ve never felt so frightened,” she adds.  

If Mr Trump was trying to deter people from voting by mail, it is not working. Early voting numbers show that roughly 25 per cent of the more than 2.7 million ballots mailed out to Pennsylvanians have been returned already. So far 76 per cent of returned ballots have come from Democrats, and only 16 per cent from Republicans.

Pennsylvania has become the key battleground in the fight over the integrity of this election. The way the polls currently stand, it is the state most likely to decide who becomes president come January. Mr Trump won here by a razor thin margin of 44,292 votes out of more than six million cast, a difference of 0.72 per cent.

Likely as a result of a wide Democratic lead in the number of mail-in ballots requested this year, the Trump campaign has made great efforts to limit or block their use wherever possible. Philadelphia, a heavily Democratic area, has become the focus of these efforts.

Trump’s campaign has filed lawsuits in the courts to block the use of drop off ballot boxes, attempted to introduce rules to throw out ballots for a mismatched signature and pushed for unofficial poll watchers to be allowed to come in from out-of-state, sparking fears of voter intimidation.

Mr Trump has also used the bully pulpit of the White House to repeatedly claim without evidence that mail-in ballots are vulnerable to fraud, and tried to hobble the postal service to block their delivery.

Never before has an American president cast so much doubt on the integrity of the electoral process. These attacks have created an atmosphere of confusion. According to a September poll by YouGov, just 22 per cent of Americans believe this year’s presidential election will be fair.

But the issue of voter suppression and intimidation is more salient for Black Americans like Boyd, who have traditionally been the target of such efforts in the past. Black Americans are particularly vulnerable to cuts to early voting, voter ID laws, and purges of voter rolls. They are also more likely to face longer queues at polling stations.

Research has shown that low-income communities of colour here in Philadelphia have been more reluctant to take up mail-in voting, which community leaders put down to distrust in the government and the voting process in general.

The election office in Overbrook, a mostly Black middle class neighbourhood, is one of seven opened across the city where residents can register to vote and drop off their mail-in ballots. They were introduced for the first time this year to help deal with an unprecedented increase in voting by mail as a result of the pandemic.

The Trump campaign has claimed these offices are shrouded in secrecy. In a lawsuit, it pushed for a change to election rules to allow its own representatives from out of state to monitor people registering to vote or filling out mail-in ballots in Philadelphia. Tellingly, it did not push for poll watchers in other Republican-leaning counties.

During the first presidential debate, Trump drew attention to an incident in which a number of his supporters were removed from one such satellite site because they were not authorised to be there.

“Today there was a big problem. They went in to watch. They are called poll watchers. They were thrown out. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things,” Mr Trump said, as he promoted a bogus claim of widespread voter fraud in the city.

Outside of the Overbrook office, Emma Tramble, a west Philadelphia native and founder of voting advocacy group My Family Votes, says those words have an effect.

“A lot of people are just afraid,” she says. “ There are misinformation and disinformation campaigns around mail-in voting, around intimidation at the polls. There’s a lot of noise, and it’s intentional,” she says.

Just hours earlier, Tramble adds, someone came to this voting centre to take pictures and tried to get inside. She suspected he might have been from the Trump campaign.

“He was on his phone reporting to somebody. It’s intimidating,” she says.

But she hopes that by being out here, educating and talking to voters, she can help people overcome those fears.

“The main thing is that if people have the information they need. If they have that, it alleviates a lot of anxiety.”

The huge numbers of early voters is a good sign for election integrity advocates. But the big test is yet to come. Pennsylvania is looking to avoid a repeat of primary elections in June, when it took weeks to count the extra mail-in ballots.

Commissioner Lisa Deeley, the Democratic chairwoman of Philadelphia’s election board, tells The Independent that big changes have been made since the primaries.

“We learned in the June primary that it takes a long time to count thousands of paper ballots, and since then we have industrialised the process and expanded our footprint. I am confident that  the votes will be counted in a timely manner, and voters should be confident that the count will be accurate,” she says.

But it still could take days or weeks to complete the count. In a worst-case scenario, some fear that Trump may try to use that period to his advantage and try to block the ballots from being counted, using a baseless accusation of fraud to justify it.  

That kind of talk convinced Vicky Thomas, a Black Philadelphia resident, to vote in person. She will vote against Trump, she says, because of his failure to protect Americans from the coronavirus.

“I want to push that button and know that my vote did go on. That paper stuff? Nuh uh,” she says. “You’re mailing in your votes, who is to say they are going to count all the votes? We’re talking about Trump here. He basically said it out loud.”

“I just think the election isn’t going to go right this time. They are going to do everything in their power so that Trump can win,” she adds.  

“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like that.”