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New Yorkers vote early in hopes of ‘really big’ Biden win
NEW YORK, Oct 25, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Wary that polls showing Donald
Trump behind could again be wrong, New Yorkers turned out massively
Saturday to vote early as they hope to ensure a “really big win” for
Joe Biden.
A long line stretched along 34th Street and then onto Seventh Avenue
in Trump’s strongly Democratic hometown on Saturday, the first day for
early voting in New York, as people calmly waited to enter a specially
organized polling station in the cavernous confines of Madison Square
Garden arena.
With the normal schedule of concerts and sporting events canceled by
the coronavirus pandemic, NBA players were able to persuade
authorities — following a series of enormous racial-justice
demonstrations — to transform several huge sporting arenas into
polling stations.
In this once hard-hit city that has so far managed to fend off a
resurgence of Covid-19, voters — all in masks — seemed ready to wait
for hours if need be before passing through the metal detectors
leading to the voting booths.
Local media reported long lines in front of more than 80 voting
sites on Saturday, as New Yorkers flocked to cast ballots even as
polls predicted Trump would lose the election — as they did in 2016
when he snagged a surprise win over Hillary Clinton.
“There’s been so much going on it’s just, it’s a privilege to be
waiting in a line like this,” Jerad Ashby, 38, a Biden supporter, told
AFP. “I think we just have to exercise our rights, and I’m excited to
be here.”
“We need someone who is decent — someone who will stand up for
everybody and not just for those that agree with him.”
For this respiratory therapist-turned-stay-at-home dad, it doesn’t
matter that New York systematically votes Democratic — as it has in
every presidential election since 1988 — or that it is not among the
battleground states expected to decide the November 3 election.
The important thing, Ashby says, is “to not just get a win but to
get a really big win.”
– The ‘strongest’ repudiation –
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Kenneth Scarlett, who works in marketing, agreed. “The country
needs to know, regardless whether you are in a blue state or a red
state, where all its citizens stand,” he said. “I want Trump to be
repudiated in the strongest possible way.”
Lisa, a 50-something finance worker who declined to give her last
name, said she, too, was willing to spend hours on the sidewalk to
exercise her right to vote.
“In 2016, too many people were complacent and didn’t come out to
vote and the wrong outcome happened,” she said. “This time we can’t
let that happen.”
In the past she had always considered herself an independent-minded
centrist, sometimes voting Republican, sometimes Democratic.
“‘Republican’ didn’t used to be a bad thing… (but) it’s just
recently become quite evil. So I will vote Democratic right down the
column.”
If she has to pay higher taxes under a Democratic president, she
said, so be it. “I would choose expensive over evil.”
But like many others, Lisa fears violence might break out after the
election — whoever wins.
New York police have been preparing for weeks for the possibility
that demonstrations could degenerate into violence.
Even for early voting, police have been deployed to Madison Square
Garden as well as the 80 other voting stations open in the city from
now through November 1.
And city authorities have announced they are recruiting an Election
Observer Corps to avoid any “intimidation” of voters.
No pro-Trump militants or agitators were in evidence Saturday
outside Madison Square Garden.
Instead it was a small group of leftist activists, there to
“encourage” voters, that was turned aside by police, who asked them to
keep their distance — and not to shout “Dump Trump!” as one of them
did.
Franco-American actor Timothee Chalamet, 24, said after voting that
“we’re in a democratic crisis in the United States. We have to vote.”
“I’m here because I’m trying to take part like everybody else in
saving this democracy. There are two people on the ballot: one person
supports democracy, one person doesn’t,” he added, making clear that
for him Biden is the one who does.
But what if the New York billionaire is re-elected, even after being
rejected by his hometown?
For 65-year-old retiree Laura Gillis, it would be the proof that a
US system that allows a candidate receiving a minority of the popular
vote to still become president — as Trump did in 2016 — “has to
change.”
But to Kenneth Scarlett, a Trump victory would not be the end:
“Instead, we work harder for the next time — you don’t despair, you
find out why and you work harder to get more citizens to see what you
saw.”
BSS/AFP/MRU/0810hrs