TAMPA, Fla. — On primary election day, thousands of voters headed to the polls only to find they looked a little different this time around thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With a couple of months to go before the presidential election, election supervisors are keeping a close eye on how things went.
“I felt pretty safe in there. Yeah, felt pretty safe,” said Jim Harrison, leaving his voting precinct in Tampa.
Harrison has been making his vote count for nearly five decades, but this time, he and others say things were noticeably different inside their local polling place.
“Well, it was the social distancing and the pens they hand you to keep,” Harrison said. “That kind of thing, you know?”
Al Lopez says he noticed far fewer voting stations right away.
“It’s normally a lot more crowded. A lot more booths,” Lopez said. “It looks like there’s only, I think, two or three booths in there. Two people checking you in.”
Hillsborough’s supervisor of elections predicts at least 70 percent of people voting in this year‘s primary had already cast their ballot through early or mail-in voting.
But that still left thousands of people showing up on a single day.
“I haven’t heard of any incidents,” said Hillsborough's Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer.
Latimer said by the afternoon, the morning rush had settled down and so far, things appeared to have gone smoothly.
The process had been undoubtedly slower, Latimer said, with social distancing, plexiglass partitions between voters and poll workers and fewer voters allowed inside at one time.
“The days of walking into one of our polling sites, our early voting sites especially, and seeing 40 voters in there along with staff, that’s not going to happen,” Latimer said.
Primary election turnout is usually only a fraction of that of voter volume in a general election.
Still, the primary should help election supervisors gauge whether any pandemic precautions put in place created issues or obstacles, and then address them before Nov. 3.
“We’ll obviously have some groups with our poll workers, or clerks,” Latimer said. “You know, what worked for you, what didn’t? Do we need to get you additional this -- or whatever it may be.”
Election supervisors say they can’t guarantee there won’t be people waiting in line to vote in November, especially if people become more cynical about voting by mail.
But in counties like Hillsborough, there will be two weeks of early voting available, 12 hours a day.
That’s a lot of opportunity, Latimer said, to vote in person and avoid any election day crowds.
“The most important thing is don’t wait,” Latimer said. “Come out at the beginning of early vote.”
“Even with a disease. Too important,” Harrison said. “Too important. Yep, gotta vote.”
Latimer says they are also working with local chambers of commerce to identify businesses willing to give younger people the day off so they can volunteer at polling sites this coming election day.
Their recruiting is already working, he said, bringing the average age of a volunteer down from 66 to 61.
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