PHILADELPHIA — Standing beside a table on the edge of campus adorned with "Hotties for Harris" signs, University of Pennsylvania student Olivia West explained that she was worried about her freedom. As a teenager, West saw Supreme Court justices appointed by former President Donald Trump take away a right that had existed for decades before she was born. In this, the first presidential election in which she can participate, West said she's doing her part, in arguably the most important swing state, to ensure no more of her liberties are lost.

"I feel like now I can use my voice to protect my rights, and every single vote counts, especially in Pennsylvania," the 21-year-old Connecticut native told Salon.

Working with a group called Project 26 Pennsylvania, so named for the constitutional amendment that set the national voting age at 18, West spent her Tuesday afternoon passing out stickers and encouraging students walking by to cast a ballot, too — preferably for Vice President Kamala Harris. Her friends are engaged this year, West said, and likewise eager to shut the door on the Trump era.

"I think people are anxiously excited right now," she said. "There's a lot of worry and concern," she added, but also intense interest. "A lot of my friends were not old enough to vote in the last election, so it's exciting that they finally get to use their voice."

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Democrats hope to attract a lot of voters similar to West: women angered by the 2022 Dobbs decision and Trump's role in overturning Roe v. Wade, who aren't convinced Republicans will stop there. Abortion bans in more than 20 states have been followed by horrific stories of people dying after hospitals, wary of their legal liability, refused to provide medical care to women suffering miscarriages and other complications from pregnancy.

At a polling station in North Philly, an outside DJ played upbeat EDM as a steady stream of residents flowed into an elementary school's gymnasium Tuesday morning to cast their ballots. In order to submit a straight Democratic ticket, per the flyer handed out by a party activist outside, voters now have to manually select each candidate, for each office.

Before 2019, voting straight ticket was easy and generally seen as benefiting Democrats, who have more registered voters in Pennsylvania, outnumbering Republicans by some 285,000 people. But Pennsylvania's Republican-led legislature banned the practice as part of a compromise bill that also legalized "no excuse" mail-in ballots. The next year, many of the same Republicans who voted for that reform turned around and baselessly decried it as enabling fraud; this, after it became clear that Democrats, more cautious about COVID-19, were far more likely than Republicans to cast their ballot via the U.S. Postal Service.

This year, Republicans have largely abandoned their mail-in fraud rhetoric and encouraged their supporters to vote early, seeking to cut in Democrats' margins and bank votes ahead of Nov. 5. At the same time, some Pennsylvania Democrats are wary of mail-in ballots post-2020, fearing they could be disenfranchised by post-election litigation.

That is reflected in the 2024 numbers: As of Tuesday morning, nearly 1.9 million Pennsylvanians had voted by mail out of more than 2.1 million people who had requested a ballot,........

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