Another pandemic casualty: The end of dinner rush at the polls?

CAMP HILL, Pa. — At 6 p.m. at any other election night, there’s supposed to be a crush of voters; people coming home from work, squeezing in a few minutes to vote before the pressure of evening routines devours whatever free time is left in the day.

But this is 2020.

Outside borough hall here, two hours before the polls closed in the most consequential election in recent memory, election volunteers outnumbered actual voters by about four to one. About a quarter-mile away, outside the Cleve J. Fredericksen Library, it was the same scene.

Democratic volunteers, who said they’d voted around 10 a.m. on Tuesday, said they’d faced a crush of in-person voters waiting to cast their ballots. But by the dinner hour, between that crush and a flood of mail-in ballots, it was entirely possible that everyone who wanted to vote had already voted, they said.

“There’s just not that many people left to vote,” one Democratic volunteer said outside borough hall.