photo by: Ashley Golledge

Ella Galbraith puts her ballot in a drop box outside the Douglas County Courthouse on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020.

Demetrius Kemp was avoiding election results as they came in Tuesday evening.

“I’m not even going to look at it,” said Kemp, who was sitting at the bar at Black Stag Brewery and Pub on Massachusetts Street around 9:30 p.m. “Because one, I don’t want to go to sleep mad if I see something I don’t like. And then I don’t want to go to sleep happy and wake up tomorrow and what I was happy about is gone.”

Kemp said his emotions had been “all over the place” recently, specifically mentioning anger at misinformation and anxiety over people’s childish behavior.

“This election could tear this country apart,” he said.

On Tuesday evening, as this Journal-World reporter interviewed people downtown about the election, most said they felt a mix of anxiety and nervousness about the results of the presidential election but that they didn’t expect to get the results that evening.

Rebecca Hampton, a 23-year-old who was sitting near Kemp at Black Stag, said she wasn’t expecting to find out the results until this weekend.

“I don’t want to get my hopes up,” she said. “I want to stay middle ground until I know for sure that I can go out and go into the streets and yell and scream and be happy about everything.”

Hampton, who voted for Joe Biden, said she’s “very anxious” about this election because she feels a lot of human rights are on the line, specifically the rights of Black people, LGBTQ people and women.

“I just hope that in the morning things will be a little bit better and that there will be a little bit more hope for our country, for our future generation,” she said.

For Johnson County resident Jacob Ryan and Lawrence resident Matthew Raby, their anxiety came from a fear that the election results might not be fair.

“I’m nervous because I just want the election to be fair and clean, with no missing ballots and all that anxiety that’s going on about that,” said Ryan, who used to live in Lawrence and was back in town Tuesday night celebrating his brother’s birthday. Ryan was eating outside Pickleman’s with Raby and his brother, Scott Ryan, around 8 p.m.

Jacob said he’d been checking on the election results pretty frequently, “maybe too much — because I should be paying attention to my brother,” he said.

University of Kansas students Katie Shipley and Molly Ford were eating ice cream outside Sylas and Maddy’s around 7 p.m. They agreed that being consumed by election news wouldn’t be good for their mental health. They said they had both voted and that they’d likely watch the election results in the basement of their sorority later in the night.

Like the KU students, 45-year-old Janine Leslie said she was not super anxious and that whatever the results would be, would be. Leslie, who works at Topeka’s Stormont Vail hospital, said she was especially curious, however, for the results of the Senate race between doctors Barbara Bollier and Roger Marshall. (Marshall later ended up victorious.)

Outside The Bourgeois Pig, KU graduate student Neno Fuller said he was “slightly anxious” about the election but that he was trying, mostly unsuccessfully, not to think about it.

“I’m so aware of it, it’s not even funny,” he said. “It’s like mental gymnastics that’s going on in my head.”

While an air of anxiety surrounded Douglas County residents Tuesday evening on Massachusetts Street, earlier in the day, most Douglas County residents said they had fine — almost normal — experiences in polling places.

Voting ‘didn’t feel weird,’ despite virus precautions

Whether it was their first time voting in a presidential election or their 20th, Douglas County voters largely managed fine on Tuesday, despite all the worries that come with the pandemic era.

“It didn’t feel weird,” said Taylor Martin, a University of Kansas student who was voting in her first presidential election.

Martin, who voted at the First Presbyterian Church, 2415 Clinton Parkway, said she originally was worried about lines, lots of people refusing to wear face masks and just general uneasiness while voting. Most of those worries ended up unfounded. She took a $3 Uber ride to the polls, lines were short and masks were aplenty at the polling place on Tuesday morning.

“It was really exciting,” Martin said. “I definitely didn’t want to miss out. You would feel guilty if you didn’t vote.”

Wiley Wilson, a 93-year-old who cast his vote at the Union Pacific Depot in North Lawrence on Tuesday morning, also said the process went fine for him.

Wearing a mask wasn’t required to vote in person on Tuesday, but people were strongly encouraged and many polling sites had poll workers who had masks available.

Speaking of poll workers, there were more of them than normal this year. Several poll workers estimated that their locations had twice as much staffing as normal. First Presbyterian and the First Southern Baptist Church — two of the larger polling locations in the county — both had slightly more than a dozen poll workers, staff there estimated.

Some staff members stood near the front door with a spray bottle of disinfectant in hand, frequently wiping down the entrance. Others did similar cleaning work on the actual polling booths.

Late Tuesday evening Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew estimated that voter turnout was 68%, with approximately 56,000 voters. That broke the previous high of approximately 54,500 voters in 2008. Shew, however, said he thinks the county’s voter turnout could hit 70% once remaining mail ballots are counted. That too would be a new high.