Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

What does it look like when patients who tested positive for COVID-19 go to the polls? Here are some photos out of St. Louis.

A strong wind blew down a non-masked voting booth in New Hampshire today, injuring one, which led our office to ask … Wait? Non-masked voting booth? Yes, and the Granite State isn’t the only place segregating voters by mask status. While at least 33 states are requiring masks to vote in a polling place today (and several others have a statewide mask mandate in place), officials told ABC News that they weren’t planning on turning away voters who showed up without a mask. Some states are trying out curbside voting, and others are segregating areas for the masked and the unmasked. Separate outdoor booths for the unmasked (like the one that blew over in New Hampshire) are just one way of compromising between public safety and a desire to make sure everyone gets a chance to cast a vote.

There are few reports of long lines today, and one jurisdiction I’ve been watching in particular is a fascinating case study in how to reduce voter wait times: Maricopa County in Arizona. Maricopa County is the most populous county in the state (it includes Phoenix and Scottsdale) and the fourth-most populous county in the nation. Between 2008 and 2012, it cut the number of polling places from 403 to 211, and long lines started to become a problem. During the 2016 primary, which saw hourslong wait times across the state, Maricopa had just one polling site for every 21,000 voters and vote centers there closed, on average, more than two hours late. At that point, and in response to a lawsuit, the county enacted a “wait-time reduction plan,” with a goal of having voters wait no more than 30 minutes to vote, on average. The plan included strategies such as hiring more poll workers, increasing the number of voting sites, and having backup equipment and ballots. It has been updated each election.

This year, the final plan included allowing voters to vote at any polling place in the county, rather than assigning each voter to a single voting location. The county also has a website where voters can check wait times before heading to the polls. We’ll need to wait until after the election to get a full sense of how well Maricopa County’s plan has gone, but so far it seems to be working: According to the site, the longest wait time is currently 25 minutes, at Surprise City Hall in Surprise, a suburb of Phoenix. Surprise, indeed!