We voted and now we wait, the burdens of the past and divisions of the present still with us.

And so we wait.

We await the results of votes cast early, ballots filled in from kitchen tables or from the seats of idling cars. Ballots we’ve dropped in the mail or in the drop box.

We await the results from those who stood in line — in a pandemic, in a year no one could have imagined — to drop a ballot in a box the same as always.

So many of us voted that it would have been physically impossible to count every ballot in every state by Tuesday night. America may not know even on Wednesday who the next president will be.

In Arizona, early returns were tinged with blue in the presidential and U.S. Senate races. If the numbers hold, it would be the first time a Democratic presidential candidate won the state since 1996, and the first time Arizona had two Democratic senators since the Truman administration.

This year’s election, for many, has felt like more than a choice of presidents.

It was a choice over a way of life and a life-shattering pandemic. And all the way down the ballot, the vote seemed to become not just a referendum on our divisive present. It was an interrogation of our troubled past.

The race for Senate in Arizona echoed with the death of vaunted Sen. John McCain and near-death of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The Senate and presidential races both carried the weight of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the fight over her replacement.

Every item, it seemed, might have some historical baggage to unpack: Municipal races from Phoenix to Scottsdale to Gilbert were not immune to the debate over whether historical racism should change our view of modern policing.

Ballot measures and even judicial appointments were wrapped up with the debate over school choice and school funding.

And overshadowing it all was the specter of voter fraud, stoked by the president himself — an uncertainty about when the final count would be complete, and whether it would be believed.

But on Election Day, there was little left to do about any of that but to vote and wait. For the most part, we did that without incident on Tuesday.

By 1:30 p.m., about 100,000 voters in Maricopa County had shown up to vote in person, in line with projections after an historic early voter turnout.

And despite the anticipation of widespread voter intimidation, reported incidents were few around the country and in Arizona.

The day was not without hiccups. Some voters in Scottsdale faced long lines in the morning, and with an hour left to go in the day, some polling locations in Maricopa County were seeing wait times of 30 minutes or more.

Several polling places in Window Rick and Chinle reportedly failed to open on time, and voting rights attorneys went to court and succeeded in forcing the polls to stay open for an extra hour.

At a polling site at Mesa Community College, frustrations boiled up over the long line and a broken machine, and a fight erupted when a Puerto Rican woman was turned away from voting.

That didn’t deter one of the last voters in line, Arturo Rivera, 21, who waited more than an hour to vote in his first presidential election. He thought about leaving, but then he thought of his parents who’d convinced him to vote because they cannot. “My family is all undocumented. My parents said I have to vote for them.”

The scattered incidents didn’t mar the meaning of the day so many had waited for for so long.

Kathryn Smith of Phoenix, 60, voted early, almost a straight Democratic ticket. She said that if the results don’t go her way, “I’ll be sad on Wednesday, drunk on Thursday and Friday, and then I will get back to work trying to change the next four years.”

Joe Hutchinson of Glendale, 67, also voted early, a straight Republican ticket. He said he too will be sad if things don’t go his way, “I’ll probably be a little down, but I’m not going to be one of these that’s going to go riot in the streets.”

Smith, an African American lawyer and graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, and Hutchinson, a white semiretired manufacturer’s representative who attended Phoenix College and Glendale College, live just a few miles from each other but see the country through different lenses.

Smith sees a country that for four years has been governed by chaos, where extremism has not only been tolerated but encouraged, and where too many people feel some lives are worth more than others. She has been working to get the vote out, volunteering with veteran’s groups and the group Common Defense.

Hutchinson sees a country that is teetering on the brink of socialism, where violence and extremism are propagated by the left, and where only an outsider can rid the country of the messes created by decades of government overreach. He’s been glued to the news — but this year he’s been too worried for his safety to even put a Trump sign in his yard.

The anxiety election

Rarely in our nation’s history have we been so polarized. Rarely in our nation’s history have our choices been so starkly different. And rarely in our nation’s history have we witnessed a campaign like this one.

Around the country, those on both sides of the divide were establishing poll-watching groups and emergency response teams to handle issues of voter suppression and ballot-counting interference. “If Trump tries to steal the election or prevent every vote from being counted, the Protect the Results will activate nationwide mobilizations to demand that all the votes are counted and for the peaceful transition of power,” the Mesa arm of a national group posted Monday.

“All across the country, Democrats are trying to use coronavirus and the courts to legalize ballot harvesting, implement a nationwide mail-in ballot system, and eliminate nearly every safeguard in our elections. ... Americans deserve to have confidence in their elections, and we will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in November,” the GOP’s Protect The Vote project posted.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office and Glendale police reported Tuesday that 18 unopened early ballots that had apparently been stolen from mailboxes had been returned to the people they were addressed to.

Nationally, the U.S. Postal Service came under fire on Tuesday for failing to obey a federal judge’s order to sweep its facilities for any ballots that may have been left behind in order to have them counted on time.

“The U.S. Postal Service’s failure to meet that court order may cast a cloud over ballots cast by eligible voters that don’t arrive in the hands of election officials in the time required by state law or by court order,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law.

The tensions over alleged voter interference will be heightened by the fact that the outcome may not be known on election night, or even in the early hours of Wednesday.

While Trump implied on Monday that any count that runs past Tuesday will be the result of subterfuge, it’s not uncommon for us to wait days or even weeks for a final vote total. In the past 60 years, the waiting game for presidential results has gone into extra innings at least six times — 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, 2004 and 2016. In Arizona, it’s even more common.

This year, though, all of the anxiety sits against the backdrop of a pandemic that has sickened 9 million Americans and killed more than 230,000 of them.

The world-view election

Indeed, the seriousness of COVID-19 is one thing Smith and Hutchinson both agree on, though they disagree on how Trump has handled it.

Smith faults Trump for trying to hide the severity of the virus from the public, for not wearing masks and for ignoring the advice of the scientific and medical community; Hutchinson believes Trump has done all he can since the early days of the virus, and that while it’s important to keep people safe, we can’t shut the entire economy down to do so.

It’s the question that has divided so many Americans.

But the vote, of course, was about more than the pandemic.

For voters, the question was about the disruption of Trump versus the insider view of 47-year politician Biden.

It was about whether the power of the Senate would remain with the Republicans who pushed through a lastminute Supreme Court appointee or be handed to the Democrats.

In part, that question hinges on Arizona, where Democrat Arizona Mark Kelly appeared to be soundly beating Martha McSally in early returns.

Kelly, a retired astronaut who is married to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassin’s bullet nearly 10 years ago, was vying with the appointed incumbent, McSally, to fill the last two years of the late Sen. John McCain’s term. Two Democrats haven’t represented the state in the Senate since Arizona icons Carl Hayden and Ernest McFarland last served together nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

And speaking of history, we also wait to learn, in an age of race and gender consciousness, whether an African American and Asian American woman will be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

The disruption election

By Election Day, with the virus mounting a comeback and the number of cases soaring, the president’s handling of the pandemic had long been one of the campaign’s central themes.

Despite mounting criticism, Trump refused to back universal mask-wearing even as he and his wife and at least a dozen White House staffers were laid low by the virus with just a month to go in the campaign.

The White House exposure may have originated at a Rose Garden ceremony honoring the nomination of conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to replace liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died in September.

The nomination and Barrett’s recordspeed confirmation just days before the election was a stick in the eye to Democrats.

Trump rebounded quickly and visited Arizona seven times in 2020, twice in the last three weeks of the campaign, with rallies in Prescott, Bullhead City, Tucson and Goodyear.

Biden visited once in early October with his running mate, Kamala Harris, who returned two weeks later for another round of socially distant appearances.

The protest election

While the pandemic cast a long shadow over the campaign, another specter loomed large, that of violence and civil unrest.

Hutchinson, the semiretired Glendale manufacturer’s rep, said that if Biden loses, he believes there will be significant pushback.

“I think there’ll be a lot of the subversive elements, be that antifa or whatever, that are just going to be emboldened to get their way,” he said.

Smith, the attorney and former Air Force officer, is less concerned about whether Trump will try to stay in office by force, given her experience in the military and her knowledge as a lawyer.

“It would be an illegal order from the commander in chief for them to interfere with the election process,” she said.

“When I went to serve my country, I didn’t say I’ll only I’ll fight for Democrats. I said, you know, I swore an oath to the Constitution I was going to fight for everybody. So now I have classmates that, you know, are very vocal for the other side. But when it all comes down to it, we have to figure out a way to live together.”

And until then, we wait.