Voting surges in Boston, across U.S. as presidential election wraps up

A massive surge of voters turned out to vote in this election both locally and nationally, pushing through the pandemic to get their votes in during a hotly contested presidential race.

“Right now we’re on pace to eclipse one of the highest turnouts in the history of the city,” Mayor Martin Walsh said late in the afternoon of Election Day.

The massive pandemic-driven expansion of early voting pushed the total way up before Tuesday in the race between the Republican President Trump and the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden. Americans reached nearly 73% of the total votes cast the 2016 presidential contest before Election Day, according to the U.S. Elections Project organization, and the early arriving tallies for various states showed higher turnout numbers across the board.

That’s 101,167,740 total votes, including 35,923,053 in-person early votes and 65,244,687 sent by mail.

Of those votes, 2,352,945 were cast in Massachusetts, per the vote-monitoring organization. More than 9 million people voted early in Florida and Texas, plus 12 million in California.

Many states changed their rules during the pandemic to make voting early and remotely easier. Here in Massachusetts, officials expanded early voting and mail-in voting, including allowing ballots to count that were postmarked by Election Day but arrive in the three days after it. Some key swing states did much the same, including Pennsylvania.

The voting is now over — even if the counting will remain ongoing for days — after a bitterly fought election between Trump and Biden in the middle of a global pandemic.

Both candidates sounded positive notes during the day, as they made final efforts to turn out their voters. Top officials on President Trump’s re-election campaign expressed confidence in their strategy just hours before most polls closed, saying that while it’s a “tight” race against Biden, “we very, very much like what we’re seeing” in key states.

“We believe this to be a tight race. We believe every vote’s going to matter,” Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said on a call with reporters Tuesday evening. “It’s going to come down to turnout. We think we’re better positioned in that type of campaign.”

Stepien said the Democrats “cannibalized their vote” by moving “those who traditionally vote on Election Day to vote early” while Republicans headed to the polls on Tuesday.

“We are driving turnout today, very much making up whatever advantage Democrats built up heading into Election Day,” Stepien said, adding that “we very, very much like what we’re seeing in the places where we’re counting on high, heavy Election Day turnout,” like in Pennsylvania.

Biden capped off a day of last-minute campaigning in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and in Philadelphia with a couple of local stops in Wilmington, Delaware.

Biden wasn’t making any predictions about the outcome of the election as the final hours of voting ticked down, saying he’s “superstitious” but remained “hopeful.” He says he’s heard from aides that there’s “overwhelming turnout” among young people, women and older Black adults in places like Georgia and Florida.

“The things that are happening bode well for the base that has been supporting me — but we’ll see,” he said. Still, he admitted, “It’s just so uncertain” because of how many states are in play.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3mKHZEw