Early U.S. voting skyrockets
Early in-person voting for the 2020 U.S. election kicked iff in Indiana on Tuesday.
Russell Hollis, the deputy director of the Marion County Clerk's office, said he expected a surge of voters.
"At the end of the day, we do anticipate this being a high turnout election."
And across the country, Americans are rushing to take advantage of early voting – in person, and by mail – at an unprecedented pace ahead of the November 3 election.
According to the U.S. Election Project, which tracks early voting, over 3.8 million people have already cast ballots. Compare that with just 75,000 by this same point in 2016.
The crush of early voting is being driven in large part by fears of contracting the coronavirus.
Some hope voting early might be safer than standing in line on Election Day, even with extra pandemic precautions.
"The voters will also have these finger coats that they can place on their index finger that they can use on the electronic poll book so that they they're not touching voting equipment directly with their skin.”
Others are choosing mail-in ballots, a method that has come under repeated attack from Republican President Donald Trump.
He has made unfounded claims that voting by mail leads to election fraud.
Saying they are trying to safeguard the election, some Republican officials are trying to make it harder to vote by mail.
In Texas, Republican governor Greg Abbott ordered a limit on the number of ballot drop boxes sites to just one per county, including in densely populated Democratic strongholds such as Dallas, Houston and Austin.
And on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with south Carolina Republicans seeking to enforce a law that mail-in ballots have a witness signature, despite a lower-court judge's ruling that such a requirement could depress turnout in a pandemic.
The breakdown in mailed-in ballots currently skews Democratic. In the battleground state of Florida, Democrats have already returned 282,000 ballots, nearly twice the number sent in by Republicans.
