This story was written by Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students and recent graduates covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
At Lehigh University’s Banana Factory, an arts and education center near the Bethlehem, PA campus, countless students anxiously waited to cast their ballots on Tuesday. Some students sat in folding chairs; others periodically glanced at the time on their phones.
Aliya Ali, a Lehigh junior, had voted that morning and was volunteering at the polling place, handing out water bottles and snacks. Ali told Teen Vogue of the urgency of her vote, “I feel like a lot of people have lost sight of basic human decency. I feel like today we voted for democracy.”
A number of Lehigh University students, as well as Bethlehem residents, stood in line for over six hours, marking some of the highest turnouts South Bethlehem’s ever recorded — as well as some of the longest wait times we’ve seen reported across the U.S., as voters waited in line for their ballots to be cast on Election Day. The county commissioner told the New York Times that he expects that the vote totals to be at least double that of previous presidential elections. Despite the long lines, a request to extend the hours of the polling location due to the wait time, filed by an attorney with the DNC, was denied, according to the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
The voting machines at Lehigh were overwhelmed in part by the massive turnout, and one of the four machines allocated to the location breaking down temporarily, according to the New York Times. Students at other Pennsylvania schools were also seeing high turnout; the Washington Post reported that at Philadelphia’s Villanova University, students waited up to three hours to vote. In states like Georgia, voting location hours were extended in some counties after bomb threats caused temporary polling place closures.
Caden DellaPenta, a Lehigh sophomore, left his house at 6:45 a.m. and didn’t end up voting until 9 a.m. DellaPenta continued to stay and work the polls after he cast his ballot. He, too, believes that voting is essential to upholding democracy.
“I think that Donald Trump is a very clear corruption of democracy. I think that he is a plague on America,” he said. “I do not think we need someone who is promulgating the American population with harmful transphobic racist rhetoric.”
