‘Hella Anxious’: Early Voting Begins in Texas Despite Pandemic and Boogaloo Threats

With the pandemic raging, the prospect of Trump-y poll watchers looming, and an FBI warning about Boogaloos in the area, democracy has never been more complicated.

Four years later, Herlinda, her mother, and brother were returning to that same polling place as early voting began in their city, but they had more than a racist clerk to worry about. In addition to a century of voter suppression, Texas voters are grappling with a global pandemic, worries of intimidation by poll watchers, and FBI warnings about far-right Boogaloos: gun-toting, Hawaiian shirt-wearing extremists.

In short, it’s never been scarier to vote in Dallas.

Despite the fears expressed by voters—particularly people of color—Dallas residents showed up in droves for the first day of early voting. At the American Airlines Center, home to the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and Dallas’ largest voting location, masked voters started lining up at 5:30 a.m. Toni Pippins-Poole, Dallas County’s elections administrator, told a local TV station that she was expecting the highest voter turnout in her 33 years on the job. She also encouraged voters to socially distance as much as possible while waiting in line.

Long lines formed in the suburbs of north Dallas, too, where Montreh Nariman-Hassanabadi lives. By the time the 26-year-old got to the Richardson Civic Center, a polling place roughly 15 minutes from downtown Dallas, lines were already snaking around the building.

Some voters, like Nariman-Hassanabadi, would end up waiting two hours.

Elsewhere in Dallas, voters said the turnouts far exceeded anything they had seen in previous elections. While voting at Martin Weiss Elementary School in South Dallas, Jasmin Flores, a 34-year-old media consultant, said she saw less apathy from friends, family members, and fellow voters in the days preceding this election.

“I think voting nowadays is out of fear on both sides, because people feel like so much is at stake,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem like that’s stopping anyone. I feel this energy, both personally and in my community. I’m Salvadoran, so I’m from one of those countries the president called a ‘shithole.’ Nothing, not even a pandemic, was going to stop me from voting.”

Over 200 miles away, at the Houston Food Bank, voters had the option to go inside and cast a ballot or through the drive-thru in the parking lot. The station supplied masks, sanitizer, and checked temperatures upon entry.

At Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, 48-year-old Ericka Thomas bemoaned what she described as a concerted effort by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to discourage turnout in a state Democrats have long fantasized about. In this case, she was referring to his limiting mail-in ballot drop-off sites—distinct from early voting locations—to one per county, despite demand inevitably being far higher from Democrats packed into urban counties.

“I feel like Abbott’s order was done intentionally to try to disenfranchise the Black vote, but we’re not going to let that happen,” Thomas, a Third Ward resident, told The Daily Beast.

Around 2 p.m. local time, the line at the Civic Center in Humble, Texas, was wrapped around the building. Hundreds of voters of all ages waited patiently in 84 degree heat to cast their ballots. Arkissia Granville, 44, shared the frustration with potential voter suppression, but was defiant all the same.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pandemic-boogaloos-and-poll-watchers-fail-to-scare-off-early-voters-in-texas