How Votes Were Counted Four Years Ago in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania
How Votes Were Counted Four Years Ago in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania
Images from voting centers in battleground states for The New York Times Magazine.
Welcome to In the Flash, a reader-supported publication about intent and creativity in photography.
Right before Trump declared Biden’s victory illegitimate and cast in doubt how voting is both conducted and counted, I spent three weeks traveling through Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania, photographing election centers for The New York Times Magazine. The feature story focused on mail by voting, and I got to see firsthand how ballots are collected, stored, sorted, and counted. It was assigned just a month before Trump’s claim of voting fraud, so the magnitude of the assignment didn’t occur to me until after the fact.
Hundreds of volunteers, with Democrats and Republicans often sitting across from each other, were counting the votes by hand. Everyone seemed happy to show off their work for the cameras, since most people in the US have no idea how this mysterious process works. When Trump called foul, this story, showing how the system functions from inside, became even more important.
My inspiration for the shoot was (unsurprisingly, if you read this newsletter) David Lynch. Lynch’s genius for transforming the mundane into uncanny drama influenced my aesthetic, and I used gels and an off-camera bare strobe to transform the sterile, fluorescently lit election centers into theatrical vignettes.
I am sharing these photos right before I am off to a voting center.
Happy voting everyone!
Find me on Instagram @dina_litovsky
Democracy by Mail - The New York Times Magazine
What Would David Lynch Do? Unlearning Photography Rules ($ post)
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Good luck America. So many hardworking people making sure that your vote gets counted properly. We have a very open style of voting here in Australia. It’s compulsory and made as simple as possible for all. Anyone can be involved in the backend that you show here and I feel total confidence in the outcomes. Hopefully America will regain its trust in the hard work done by so many in the background. A cool bunch of photographs. Thanks so much.
You know I love your style and I love these photos out of context of their import, but I don't know if dressing what should be felt as a safe and open bureaucratic procedure like a horror film is really the best editorial choice. I feel like these photos support the sense of clandestine, closed-door, opaque back-room dealing Americans are increasingly beginning to suspect ballot counting to be and that's a disservice to their relatively straightforward, procedural, supervised, and transparent accounting.