Hope and fear on voters' minds as they cast ballots

People wait in line to vote on election day in Boston.

, Jenny Jarvie, Noah Bierman and Faith E. Pinho

Nov. 5, 2024 9:52 AM PT

More than 83 million Americans had cast ballots as of Tuesday morning.
Law enforcement officials were girding for threats against election workers, violence at polling places and voter intimidation.

After Justin Jones finished work early Tuesday, the commercial driver voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential contest. But he didn’t feel good about his choice.

“Trump is dangerous, he’s unhinged,” Jones, 33, said outside his East Point, Ga., polling station. “Harris needs to establish more dominance, I don’t want to feel like I’m pity voting for her.”

Immigration was on his mind: Jones thought the border needs to be secured, an issue he said Harris ought to take more seriously. But he could not bring himself to vote for Trump, despite agreeing with him about the economy and immigration. Jones described the former president as a “weird person” who represents a threat to democracy. But he also worried about Harris’ competence.

“It’s kind of like me trying to run the New York Yankees,” Jones said of Harris leading the country. “I mean, I know a lot about baseball and stuff, but it’s a lot going into running a professional baseball team. I’m pretty sure she’s good with policies and she’s tough on crime, but this is the leader of the free world!”

Stickers sit on a table inside a polling place in Atlanta.

Jones is among tens of millions of Americans who were heading to their local polling places Tuesday.

Amid the deep polarization among the nation’s citizenry in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection and the COVID-19 pandemic, law enforcement officials were girding for threats against election workers, violence at polling places and voter intimidation — and preparing for what happens once the final ballots are cast.

“I’m terrified,” said Amy Trachtenberg, 72, said after she voted for Harris in her downtown Philadelphia high-rise.

“I remember how it felt in 2016 that night,” she said, recalling when it became clear that Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. If the former president is reelected, “I know that he’s just going to be so much worse, and people are going to be hurting.”

The retired social worker spoke on a clear and mild morning in Philadelphia as workers made their way into the city during rush hour wearing “I voted” stickers. Lines at downtown precincts were busy and people who have been inundated with out-of-town organizers and ads for months could be heard speculating about the results on their cellphones, anxious to see a conclusion to the contest.

Justin Jones voted in East Point, Ga., on Tuesday.

But there was an undercurrent of fear — not only about the result, but about what it will say about the character of the nation.

“I don’t want to hope,” Trachtenberg said. “There’s part of me that thinks, you know, a Black woman’s never going to get elected in America. No one talks about that.”

Trachtenberg said Harris has done everything she can to win. “People keep talking about these things that are just baked in. And so I wonder what’s baked into America.”

In the red-leaning exurbs of Fayette County, Ga., about 20 miles south of Atlanta, Danette Corcoran, a 67-year-old bus driver, voted for Trump because she thought he represented common sense.

“We just need to change things and fix things,” Corcoran said. “Democrats can’t do that.”

A former Democrat who was born and raised in Minnesota, Corcoran said she believed her former party had dropped the ball on the economy and immigration. After voting for Trump in 2016 and 2020, she was upset when he left the White House. She blamed election fraud — and Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — for Trump’s loss.

Corcoran said she looked forward to having the former president back in the White House and hoped he would put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of healthcare.

“I don’t like his personality — he’s a little brash,” she said of Trump. “But he can wheel and deal and fix things. I felt secure in my country when he was president. With Biden and Harris, I watched the world implode. Prices have gone sky high.”

Corcoran said she felt confident that Trump would win. But if he lost, she said, she trusted that he would contest the results and rail against the “good ol’ boy” system.

“I hope he pitches a fit,” she said.

Corcoran’s chief anxiety was a Democratic uprising: a Trump victory, she said, would lead people in the cities to pillage and plunder.

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She also didn’t like the idea of a Californian as president.

“California is moving in here and we don’t like it,” she said. “We’re paying the high prices.”

More than 83 million Americans had cast ballots as of Tuesday morning in the election that will determine not only whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Trump will win the White House, but also which party seizes control of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

In Phoenix, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes reassured Arizonans that election officials were ready for a long but efficient election day.

“As far as I know right now, everything in the state of Arizona is running about as smoothly as can be,” Fontes told reporters Tuesday morning at a Phoenix library.

Aside from a rare minor problem — one election official forgot to bring a key to open a polling station around 6 a.m. — Fontes said polling places were up and running across the state, and will be until closing at 7 p.m. local time.

The first results to be released Tuesday night will account for votes cast early — an estimated 55% of the total count, Fontes said. Ballots cast on election day and in the last day or so will take longer, and official results from the state are likely to take 10 to 13 days, Fontes said, though media projections may come much earlier. He added the state has already seen record early voting.

Hours before the polls opened, the presidential candidates made their final pitches to voters.

Harris held her final rally of the campaign Monday night, 106 days after President Biden decided not to seek reelection, with a heavy dose of celebrity, trying to bring back the joy that characterized her early weeks on the trail.

Outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, by the iconic steps Sylvester Stallone ran as he trained in the “Rocky” movie franchise, the vice president implored a raucous crowd to make a plan to vote.

“One more day, just one more day in the most consequential election of our lifetime,” she said. “And momentum is on our side.”

Trump, in his final rally, continued to frame the nation as a disaster, threatened by a flood of dangerous criminal immigrants and suffering from major economic woes, which he blamed on Harris, who he called a “radical left lunatic who destroyed San Francisco.”

He also railed about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“She’s a crooked person, she’s a bad person. Evil. She’s an evil, sick, crazy b ... ,” Trump said, before appearing to stop himself from finishing the word.

“Oh no,” Trump said, as his supporters laughed. “It starts with a B but I won’t say it. ... I want to say it.”

Although voters are anxious for the election to be over, unless polling that shows an incredibly tight election is wrong, it’s unlikely that the nation will know who the next occupant of the White House is Tuesday night after the polls close. If it’s a very close election, it would be days or potentially longer before the next president is named.

On Tuesday night, “Everyone needs to take a breath, have some patience, have a glass of wine, and get up the next day and do it all over again,” Rick Hasen, a campaign-finance law professor at UCLA, told The Times for a story about the patchwork of vote-counting rules that could delay the result. “Maybe at the end of the week, we know what the answer is. Unless it’s a blowout.”

Mehta reported from Washington, D.C., Bierman from Philadelphia, Jarvie from East Point, Ga., and Pinho from Phoenix. Times staff writers Brittny Mejia, in Las Vegas, and Kevin Rector, in San Francisco, contributed to this report.

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