Voting rights advocates have encouraged voters to “plan their votes” ahead of time during a global pandemic while the president and his GOP cronies do everything imaginable to restrict the voting process. In Virginia, it appears that a lot of people chose to plan their votes for the first day of early voting, leading to an unprecedented number of people showing up at polls in Fairfax.
Massive line of voters in Fairfax, Virginia, on the FIRST DAY of in-person early voting. Some voters say they showed up because they lost faith in USPS to deliver ballots. Officials tell CNN they've never seen anything like this on Day One. pic.twitter.com/uFDSfMINWX
— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) September 18, 2020
Trump has said repeatedly that only his voters are enthusiastic about voting, but that didn’t appear to be the case on Friday. In Virginia, a solidly blue state in the 2020 elections, Joe Biden is beating Trump in the polls by 14 points while Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, currently has a 19-point lead over his challenger, Daniel Gade.
The president has railed against mail-in ballots, insisting that they lead to massive numbers of fraudulent votes being cast. Early voting, however, has not been part of his attacks on democracy, and he’s losing in a number of states where ballots are already being counted. Additionally, absentee ballots have been requested by far more Democratic voters than Republican ones, indicating that Biden may get an early lead there, as well. Add to that the fact that a far higher rate of Democrats who didn’t vote in 2016 are requesting absentee ballots, it’s all bad news for the Trump campaign in Virginia, a state where Trump only lost by five points in 2016 to Hillary Clinton.
Twitter was stunned and thrilled at the images of early voting lines. Read some of their comments below:
