Desperate voters book last-minute flights to the polls: 'Five hours of flying is more than worth it'
Kaela Bynoe, a medical student in Baltimore, had been checking the mail every day to see whether her absentee ballot had arrived from her home state of Florida. But it never showed up, and she began to worry it would be too late for her to send it back before the state’s mail-in deadline.
So Bynoe, 23, made alternative plans: She spent $600 on a last-minute flight to vote in person. Upon arriving in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday, she took an Uber straight from the airport to the nearest polling site, cast her ballot and turned right back around to catch a return flight to Maryland.
“If I hadn’t been able to get a flight, I would have driven down to vote,” Bynoe said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I don’t believe in being complacent. You should always exercise your right to vote."
She is not the only one who has flown across the country to get to the polls. As absentee voters from Pennsylvania and other key states report not yet having received their ballots in the mail, a few like Bynoe have given up on waiting and taken matters into their hands.
Even if it is expensive and time-consuming, they say it is worth it. Amid a heated, divisive campaign season, a global pandemic that has complicated normal voting procedures and a flood of mail-in ballots inundating the U.S. Postal Service, some voters are going the distance — in this case, literally — to ensure their votes can be counted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/27/flights-vote-home-election-ballot/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1x85uOmPf5uTEzgzJCxCfJoG7BdPbXbDQFEKqv9u-530MAQ0Lp940XPMg
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Thank you wherever you are.
