Trump’s attacks on voting ‘backfired and only inspired people to march early to the polls’: report

Clark County Registrar of Voters Joseph Gloria has had three decades of election experience in Nevada, but had never seen a "perfect storm," as he called it, like this before. With all hands on deck for this election cycle, Gloria helped put together an entire mail-in voting system in less than 90 days to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’m as comfortable as I can be because I have an excellent staff,” Gloria said. “We learned some things in the primary and are feeling good about this cycle, but unfortunately we have people at the national level who are encouraging people to do things that disrupt the polling place and make it a challenge for us to process votes.”

Gloria was referring to President Donald J. Trump's call to his supporters to patrol the polls. In other words, voter intimidation in the form of anti-maskers with passionate pleas to vote for their candidate. Rather than having them removed, Gloria said they are "allowing them to come in and vote, but they have to vote on a socially distanced machine.”

Gloria said it appeared to be an organized effort to disrupt the voters while casting their ballots.

“They don’t follow the observer rules,” Gloria said. “It’s been more of a challenge this year than it’s ever been before.”

Vincent Booker and his mother, Tina Carter, cast ballots in person in an effort to ensure nothing was misplaced or delayed. Any concerns they had about extremist group harassment or COVID-19 exposure were far outweighed by the gravity of the election, The Daily Beastreported.

“I just don’t like Trump,” Booker said, asserting the president lacks empathy in a time of crisis. “I definitely did not want my vote to get lost. I just think we need to make a change.”

“There’s an urgency,” Carter said. “My thing is the pandemic. I think it could have been handled a whole lot better. I am a contact tracer, so I deal with exposures and positive results, and I feel like the president failed us as Americans, and I do need to see a change.”

At Henderson’s Galleria Mall, the Aquino family voted together. Mother Jennifer Aquino shared on behalf of the family, “I definitely didn’t want to have my ballot lost in the mail, and I wanted to make sure it was there on time.”

And it's happening all across the state. Mother of four Marie Hansen waited 45 minutes to vote in person, noting that the Trump administration's post office delays were not going to slow her down. “I just felt that, for this election, I wanted to vote in person," she said.