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Bedlam at the Ballot Box Almost as soon as voting began, social media lit up with accounts of voting chaos in the primaries, nowhere more so than in Illinois. One poll worker live-blogged her experience at a Chicago polling station, where she and her elderly colleagues waited fourteen hours since before 5 a.m. for a blue box of voting supplies that never came. After ten hours, she said, they had turned away at least a hundred eligible voters, including many who were unable to vote at a different time. They were instead forced to send voters to an alternate location, one with an hours-long wait. Videos and photographs captured long, shoulder-to-shoulder lines and voters crammed into small spaces as they voted. One voter told Sanders campaign staffer Abshir Omar that, in one of these instances, voters had waited two or three hours to vote; some simply left without voting. One couple, one of whom suffered from lung disease, braved the polling booths and traveled to three polling places before they could finally vote. This was a common story among Chicagoans. Megan, a thirty-nine-year-old nonprofit worker who lives on the city’s south side, woke up to check online if her polling place was still open, only to be repeatedly met with an error message. Deciding to simply go to the polling site, she found it abandoned, with no signs explaining what voters should do. At a different polling site, a man who identified himself as the precinct captain told her that “they won’t let us put signs up.” Ultimately, she voted as an early voter at a police station. Altogether, it took her an hour to finally cast her vote. Lawson, 31, had a similar experience. Getting up early to vote, he found his polling place, St Sylvester School, shut down with no signs or personnel present, only encountering a sign instructing him where else to go when he returned during his lunch break. Arriving at the new polling location, he was informed that, nearly six hours into the election, they were still waiting for voting supplies to come, and directed to an early voting location forty minutes’ walk away. “I ended up late to a work meeting, though my boss was understanding,” he says. “But if someone was operating on a thirty-minute break, it might’ve been different.” Sometimes, initiative and personal sacrifice saved the day. When his building pulled out of serving as a polling location, Lucien, 25, noticing that no signs had been posted instructing voters where else to go, put his own makeshift signs in and around the location. It then took him forty-five minutes to cast his vote at a police station, before signing up to help out at another polling place that was short three polling judges. “I think the responsible decision would have been, at least in Illinois, to delay the election, or do all mail-in,” he says. “I don’t know how many voters were able to vote.” But even mail-in ballots could hit a snag. University of Illinois at Chicago graduate student Lindsey, forty, hadn’t been at work since March 9 due to a seasonal cold, so she filed for a vote-by-mail option that very day. But from March 12 onward, her ballot was stuck in a facility in Carol Stream, twenty-seven miles west of the city. With her in-person polling location closed, the nearest one was a five-mile trip on public transit, not an option given the pandemic and her own illness. Told she could still send her ballot as long as it was post-marked by election day, she found the ballot miraculously sitting in her mailbox at 4:30 p.m. — but with only fifteen minutes to travel two miles to a post office that would expose her to more people, she was unable to send it. “I feel frustrated,” she says. “I really do think that I tried to think ahead.” Lindsey had planned to vote for Sanders, believing that “if we’re seeing anything from the current situation we’re in, we desperately need health care for everyone widely available.” The sanitary conditions of polling places were a wild card. While a number of voters described safe, responsible management of the conditions in polling places, with social distancing and regular disinfecting of voting machines and other tools, some were far from ideal. Caitlin, a thirty-two-year-old organizer for the Cook County College Teachers Union, was shocked at what she saw working as a poll watcher in Chicago’s Thirtieth Ward, calling it a “really unsanitary scene.” With nearly 300 people voting at the location over the course of the day, as many as twenty to twenty-five voters were packed into a small room at one point as they waited to cast their ballots, with no hand sanitizer, no cleaning equipment, and pens, clipboards, and screens being shared between people without being cleaned. The poll workers, a number of whom were elderly, weren’t given any equipment; one, an elderly man, brought his own mask, while another wore the same pair of gloves for the entire experience. “I felt very uncomfortable with the whole thing, considering our governor said we should stay home,” she says. “They shut down sporting events, but for some reason, they thought it was okay for this election to go forward.” The scene was a stark contrast from the polling place she herself had voted in earlier that morning, she says, which had hand sanitizer and only allowed five or six voters inside at any one time. Video producer Ryan, 31, was similarly shocked when he turned up at a polling place just before 9 a.m. in a western suburb of Chicago, only to find three poll workers with no gloves, no masks, and no hand sanitizer huddled around an electronic ballot box. It had just arrived, they told him, and it would take them a while to get it up and running. “I didn’t want to stay around too long because of social distancing,” he says. He wasn’t told where else to go and vote. Such issues weren’t limited to Illinois. In Phoenix, it took Cassandra, 30, nearly three hours to finally cast her vote, having had to travel to three different polling locations, the last of which was around seven miles away. Once there, she waited for half an hour in a line that made it difficult to practice social distancing, and she had to check in on computers that weren’t being wiped down between uses while elderly poll workers manned the location. “Luckily, my work is allowing telework,” she says. “Not everyone is able to, obviously.” Cole, a forty-six-year-old manufacturing technician from Gilbert, Arizona, was turned away at his usual polling place because the machines for verifying voter IDs had broken down. The next closest location was four or five miles away, but when he went to cast his ballot, the machine had run out of battery. He was instead forced to place it in a slot labeled “misread,” which the poll worker assured him would get counted. “I was really nervous about putting it in, but I didn’t have any choice,” he says. One silver lining for Cole: while previous years involved one- to two-hour-long waits to vote, this time, there was hardly anyone present. Nonetheless, the whole experience cost him an hour and twenty minutes.