Florida, Illinois, Arizona go to polls against backdrop of emergency measures and disruption that have cancelled Ohio primary
- US states improvise coronavirus rules in absence of federal leadership
- Joe Biden poised for another successful night
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11.17am GMT
“Everywhere you look, the storefronts in this town are shuttered. This time, it has nothing to do with an economic downturn; it is the day after Governor Mike DeWine closed all of the schools and ordered bars and restaurants to shut down, all an attempt to slow the spread of coronavirus. Outside city hall, a rental truck with voting machines is loading them into the municipal offices.”
Those voting machines won’t be getting used today in Ohio. Salena Zito has been on the ground in the small Ohio city of East Liverpool for the Washington Examiner, and this is what they found…
10.56am GMT
It may be that fears around coronavirus don’t have as much of an impact on voting trends in the three states holding their primaries today as you might expect, thanks to a big take-up of early voting. As Ed Kilgore observed yesterday in New York magazine:
Arizona is a heavy vote-by-mail state, providing voters the option of permanently registering to automatically receive mail ballots, and upwards of 80 percent choose to vote remotely. In Florida, 632,000 registered Democrats have already voted by mail for the March 17 primary (compared to a total of 520,000 in 2016). In Illinois, the deadline for requesting mail ballots has been extended, and in Chicago, at least, requests for mail ballots have tripled as compared to 2016, and total early voting has occurred at record levels.
