PHILADELPHIA — Standing beside a table on the edge of campus adorned with "Hotties for Harris" signs, University of Pennsylvania student Olivia West explained that she was worried about her freedom. As a teenager, West saw Supreme Court justices appointed by former President Donald Trump take away a right that had existed for decades before she was born. In this, the first presidential election in which she can participate, West said she's doing her part, in arguably the most important swing state, to ensure no more of her liberties are lost.
"I feel like now I can use my voice to protect my rights, and every single vote counts, especially in Pennsylvania," the 21-year-old Connecticut native told Salon.
Working with a group called Project 26 Pennsylvania, so named for the constitutional amendment that set the national voting age at 18, West spent her Tuesday afternoon passing out stickers and encouraging students walking by to cast a ballot, too — preferably for Vice President Kamala Harris. Her friends are engaged this year, West said, and likewise eager to shut the door on the Trump era.
"I think people are anxiously excited right now," she said. "There's a lot of worry and concern," she added, but also intense interest. "A lot of my friends were not old enough to vote in the last election, so it's exciting that they finally get to use their voice."
Democrats hope to attract a lot of voters similar to West: women angered by the 2022 Dobbs decision and Trump's role in overturning Roe v. Wade, who aren't convinced Republicans will stop there. Abortion bans in more than 20 states have been followed by horrific stories of people dying after hospitals, wary of their legal liability, refused to provide medical care to women suffering miscarriages and other complications from pregnancy.
At a polling station in North Philly, an outside DJ played upbeat EDM as a steady stream of residents flowed into an elementary school's gymnasium Tuesday morning to cast their ballots. In order to submit a straight Democratic ticket, per the flyer handed out by a party activist outside, voters now have to manually select each candidate, for each office.
Before 2019, voting straight ticket was easy and generally seen as benefiting Democrats, who have more registered voters in Pennsylvania, outnumbering Republicans by some 285,000 people. But Pennsylvania's Republican-led legislature banned the practice as part of a compromise bill that also legalized "no excuse" mail-in ballots. The next year, many of the same Republicans who voted for that reform turned around and baselessly decried it as enabling fraud; this, after it became clear that Democrats, more cautious about COVID-19, were far more likely than Republicans to cast their ballot via the U.S. Postal Service.
This year, Republicans have largely abandoned their mail-in fraud rhetoric and encouraged their supporters to vote early, seeking to cut in Democrats' margins and bank votes ahead of Nov. 5. At the same time, some Pennsylvania Democrats are wary of mail-in ballots post-2020, fearing they could be disenfranchised by post-election litigation.
That is reflected in the 2024 numbers: As of Tuesday morning, nearly 1.9 million Pennsylvanians had voted by mail out of more than 2.1 million people who had requested a ballot, about a third of them Republicans, according to the Pennsylvania secretary of state — a drop from the 2.6 million who voted by mail four years ago, when less than a quarter of such votes came from Republicans and President Joe Biden carried the commonwealth by just more than 80,000 votes.
As of 7 p.m. ET, with an hour to go before polls closed, city officials had yet to provide turnout figures. Anecdotally, however, in-person turnout appeared on track to exceed 2020, poll workers and local Democrats said. That would be a good sign for Harris, who hopes women's anger at Trump, the Dobbs decision and democratic backsliding will help propel her to be the first woman elected as president.
Most early votes were cast by women, according to an analysis by The Philadelphia Inquirer, suggesting a 13% gender cap in turnout. That would also be encouraging to Democrats, who have made a concerted effort to appeal to Republican women; an NBC News poll released on the eve of the election showed Harris with a 16% advantage among women voters, who typically turn out at a higher rate than men (who favored Trump by 18% in the same survey).
The reduced mail-in voting could also mean a quicker call: In 2020, it took Philadelphia more than four days to count all the ballots it received, time that Trump and his allies used to spread disinformation. In large part, that delay was due to Republicans in the state legislature, who refused to allow election officials to count mail-in ballots before 7 a.m. local time on Election Day.
Republicans lost control of the Pennsylvania state house in 2022, but they still control the state senate, where the party has refused to pass legislation allowing the early count of mail-in ballots. That means Trump could still exploit a day-of Republican advantage in turnout — if there is one — to once again claim a premature victory and potentially suggest there is something nefarious about the count continuing.
To suppress Democratic turnout, Trump allies appeared to send some Philadelphia voters an antisemitic text message, reviewed by Salon, that was intended to appear as if it were sent by the Harris campaign. The vice president, per the text, allegedly "supports Israel 100%" and would be joined in the White House by "her husband and top advisor, Doug Emhoff . . . Who would be the 1st Jewish presidential spouse ever!"
Identical language was used in a YouTube ad from the Future Coalition PAC, funded in part by the billionaire Elon Musk, who has been leading the former president's get-out-the-vote efforts and contributed tens of millions of dollars to his election campaign. A separate text, sent from the same number Tuesday afternoon, contradicted the original message, warning that a "vote for Harris is a vote to continue Biden's failed Israel First agenda."
That was the same tactic, with clumsy implementation, that the super PAC employed earlier in the election cycle. According to 404 Media, the pro-Trump group, seeking to exploit tensions over the war in Gaza and sow discord among the Democratic coalition, sent pro-Israel texts to areas with lots of Muslim voters while seeking to convince Jewish voters that Harris actually "stands with Palestine."
By Election Day, it appeared, the group gave up on tailoring its messages and decided to send some voters both versions.
That wasn't the only apparent effort at discouraging turnout that voters faced in the City of Brotherly Love. On Tuesday afternoon, Philadelphia authorities said they also received reports of voter intimidation, including calls about people blocking entrances to polling stations, CBS News reported. There had also been reports of partisan poll watchers using hidden cameras to film election workers; one Republican-affiliated poll watcher was also caught filming outside a polling station, in violation of state law.
But the biggest threat to a free and fair election may not have been on the ground Tuesday. Posting from his residence in Florida, Trump claimed on his website Tuesday afternoon, just hours before polls closed, that there was a "lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia," adding: "Law Enforcement coming!!!"
An hour later, Trump, possibly seeking to discourage voters wary of the police, continued lying on Truth Social: "Philadelphia and Detroit! Heavy Law Enforcement is there!!!"
As in 2020, the Republican candidate provided no evidence of wrongdoing. Local officials said he was simply making it up.
"The only talk about massive cheating has come from one of the candidates, Donald J. Trump," Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said in a statement to Salon. "There is no factual basis whatsoever within law enforcement to support this wild allegation. We have invited complaints and allegations of improprieties all day. If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath."
That response was echoed by Philadelphia's city commissioners, who oversee local elections.
"We have evidence and proof to show that everything's on the up and up right now," City Commissioner Omar Sabir told reporters outside a new secure ballot-counting facility in Northeast Philadelphia. Trump's allegation is "nothing new," he said. "This playbook has been played since 2020."
Seth Bluestein, Philadelphia's lone Republican commissioner, echoed that assessment.
"There is absolutely no truth to the allegation," he said, noting he has reached out to the Republican National Committee to request support for their candidate's claims.
Prior to the election, Bluestein told Salon that he hoped the addition of new ballot-counting machines would speed up the time it takes Philadelphia to count votes and possibly stop claims of fraud from spreading. On Tuesday night, Salon witnessed those machines whirring through more than 175,000 mail-in ballots, though officials had not yet said when the count might end: At a press conference just after 9:15 p.m., they said they expected a total of around 200,000 mail-in ballots to be received overall, down from 375,000 in 2020.
As of 9:45 p.m. local time, election workers had processed nearly 170,000 mail-in ballots, according to the commissioners' office. Anecdotally, the commissioners told reporters, turnout appears to be up compared to previous presidential elections, though they said actual figures would not be available until just before midnight.
In 2020, a multi-day delay provided ample time for Trump and his allies to spread false claims and threaten officials whom they accused of rigging the vote. At the old ballot-counting site, in Center City, some Trump supporters showed up with guns; the new facility is far less accessible, surrounded by metal fencing and, on Tuesday, a good deal of police.
But what worries some experts isn't the speed at which ballots are counted but that Trump demonstrably does not need any evidence to convince his followers — which number in the millions — that he is, again, a victim of fraud. Doubt alone could be enough for his allies to claim the election is fraudulent and ultimately seek to put forward an alternate slate of electors in Pennsylvania. That these electors would lack legal standing — Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, is the only person who can legally certify the commonwealth's electors — may not be an obstacle in an increasingly politicized judiciary.
"What keeps me up at night is the worry that there are all sorts of legal questions that we don't know the answers to, that are undecided and that a court would be either unable or unwilling to step in last minute to resolve,” Claire Finkelstein, founder of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview Tuesday afternoon.
Finkelstein pointed to hoax bomb threats at polling stations in several battleground states that resulted in several brief closures, potentially disenfranchising would-be voters (the FBI and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, attributed the threats to Russia). As Shapiro noted at a press conference Tuesday night, "high turnout" in the commonwealth was greeted, in the final hour of in-person voting, with "multiple bomb threats." None of the threats were deemed credible, and Philadelphia officials said voters there were not affected.
In a tight race, however, litigation over the threats and measures taken to address them, such as extended polling hours, could conceivably end up in the federal court system. That is a cause for concern, Finkelstein said.
Many Democrats fear that unresolved questions could land before a Supreme Court that has already shown deference to Trump, granting him immunity and effectively delaying his 2020 election interference trial until after Nov. 5. Earlier this month, the justices let stand a Pennsylvania court decision that allowed voters with botched mail-in ballots to cast provisional ballots in person, which Finkelstein said was reassuring. But will they likewise refuse to intervene if legal challenges persist well after Election Day? In 2000, a less conservative court, in a 5-4 decision, halted a recount in Florida, handing George W. Bush the presidency.
"Bush v. Gore set a precedent for the Supreme Court to get involved. It's not clear that they ever should have, or that they should have stopped that recount," Finkelstein said. "And there is grave concern around the Supreme Court getting involved in what could end up being a highly, highly contested election."
It's not that it's likely, per se, but it is no doubt a possibility.
"Donald Trump has already told us that he will contest the election if he loses — and they're already preparing to do that," she added. "So yeah, I think it's a very substantial concern that the court will play politics with this. I hope they won't."
