Consider This from NPR - Q & A: Voting And Acts Of Kindness

Episode Date: May 30, 2020

Bestselling author Cheryl Strayed joins NPR's Ari Shaprio as listeners share stories about acts of kindness they've experienced.These excerpts come from NPR's nightly radio show about the coronavirus crisis, The National Conversation. In this episode:-NPR reporter Miles Parks answers questions about how upcoming elections can be run safely.-Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of 'Wild' and host of the podcast Sugar Calling, joins NPR host Ari Shapiro to hear listeners' stories about acts of kindness during the pandemic.Find and support your local public radio station.This episode was recorded and published as part of this podcast's former 'Coronavirus Daily' format.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. More than a dozen states still have primary elections coming up. Today, we'll hear listener questions about how those elections will work and later something

uplifting to end the week on. Best-selling author Cheryl Strayed joins NPR's Ari Shapiro to hear listener stories about acts of kindness they experienced during the pandemic. Those excerpts come from our friends on the radio show, The National Conversation, with All Things Considered. Here's host Michelle Martin. 2020 will surely be remembered as the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But until early March, it was above all a presidential election year. A crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates was battling it out to challenge President Trump in November. Former Vice President Joe Biden swept multiple primaries, becoming the party's presumptive nominee. Turnout was expected to reach record highs.

Then everything more or less stopped. The pandemic seemed to put the election on pause for many people, but clearly not for everybody. Many of you sent questions about voting and the election cycle. So here with some answers is NPR's Miles Parks, who covers voting and election interference. Miles, good to have you with us. Hi, Michelle. So let's jump right into the questions. First, we have Deirdre in Philadelphia. Because of COVID-19, voting by mail has been discussed more often and is being met with a lot of resistance. My question is, who cares? Why does it matter so much to people how we vote? Why the social media pushback?

Miles, what can you tell Deirdre? So she's right. I mean, there is a real divide right now when it comes to mail voting. But I think the real divide is between the White House, you know, President Trump and much of the rest of America. You know, broadly, people in this country support mail voting. More than 70 percent of Americans think every registered voter should receive should have the option to receive a ballot if they want to in the mail. That's according to a Pew study from earlier this year. And states, both Republican and Democratic, are expanding access to mail voting right now. But almost every day, we're also seeing tweets from the president and comments from people on his staff that this is a bad, a fraudulent way to vote, despite there being no evidence that

that's the case. And despite the fact that the president, he himself, has voted by mail in the last few election cycles. So you're seeing this conflict between obviously the person at the top of our government and the rest of the country on how voting should be done in this country. What about voting online? So voting online is getting a lot more press right now because of the pandemic. I think people are looking at it as like a shiny object that potentially could kind of save us this year because of the pandemic. But when you talk to security experts, it is really not the answer right now. And the big reason is security. You know, it's kind of easy to forget that just a couple of years ago or a couple of months ago, cybersecurity was the most important thing we were thinking about when it came to this election.

The Internet just isn't a safe place right now. And I know a lot of listeners are probably thinking, you know, I bank online, I shop online, why can't I vote online? But that's not really the case. You know, it's not like there's not fraud in banking and shopping online. It's just those companies take billions of dollars in losses and make it up in fees or charges. And elections can't really work that way is what cybersecurity experts say. We're just not there yet from a technology standpoint. I have another question about safety. It's from a different vantage point. This is Chuck in New York. Let's listen. I agree to be an election worker for the election that New York State holds in June. Is there any advice from your experts on how to conduct that election, how to avoid any of this COVID-19 illness.

Appreciate any help you can give us. That's an important question, Miles. What do you have? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I want to say thanks to Chuck for doing that. This is a problem election officials are having right now is getting people who are willing to volunteer to work the polls. But basically, the guidance, safety guidance is kind of the same in an election scenario as it is for the rest of the country. Election officials are stocking up on gloves, disinfectant. They should be thinking about trying to clean anything that multiple voters are going to be touching, you know, door handles. If it's a place that uses any sort of check-in machine or voting machine, they should be cleaning those. But the toughest thing, I think, is going to be the socially distant part of this.

Because a lot of these polling stations that election officials have traditionally used are in, you know, small community centers or small churches where a line of 10 or 15 or 20 people wouldn't be a big deal a year ago. But now you think about a line of 20 or 30 people six feet apart, and now you're talking about a line, you know, wrapping around a building or stretching out into the parking lot or something like that. That, I think, is something that people who are working the polls really have to be focused on. I think it's not something that when voters go up to wait in line to check in, they're not going to be necessarily thinking about that distance, and that's going to be something that poll workers need to be kind of emphasizing. Kenneth in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has a very interesting question about November. Here it is. My question is whether or not there's a possibility that the presidential election will

be postponed if the spread of the coronavirus continues or is not under control as Election Day approaches. If so, what is the protocol for such an event? Miles, is there any such possibility? I want to say no. You know, the Election Day has been set in federal statute, the presidential Election Day, I should say, as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and that's been in federal law since 1845. We've kept that date through wars,

through a pandemic, the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. We have voted on that date. Legally speaking, though, it is technically possible for the date to move. It would be incredibly complicated and it would involve a level of bipartisan support. You would need the Democratic-controlled House to agree with the Republican-controlled Senate and have the president sign off on any election date adjustment. And then you think about the fact that the Constitution, you would also have to have a constitutional amendment involved if you ever wanted to delay it past January. So it would be so incredibly

difficult that most experts think it's basically impossible. There's definitely no executive authority that gives the president, for instance, the ability to move that date. Kate in Washington, D.C. is wondering about voter registration. How is it that we are accomplishing voter registration when that's something that often happens in person and especially at large gatherings of people? Miles? Yeah, I mean, this is a struggle. You think about DMVs, you think about college campuses. These are the places where people typically get registered to vote,

and none of them are open right now. That's being felt in the data. You know, registration had been up compared to the 2016 cycle and the 2020 cycle up until the pandemic, but that is completely leveled off. The Secretary of State of Kentucky spoke to my colleague Pam Fessler and told her that in February, they had a net registration of 7,000 new registrations. In March, that number dropped to 500. And then in April, they had a net loss of 1,000 registrations on the roll. So the numbers are being felt. The question is, are we going to be in a place in a few months where people can start knocking on doors again? I think the campaigns are kind of chomping at the bit to get out there and get people registered. So it's not completely certain that the registration

numbers are going to dip. It just depends on what the next couple months look like. We talked about turnout at the very beginning of this, and you were saying turnout was expected to be really high. What are people saying now? Yeah, two things. I mean, one is that people are expected to be voting by mail at higher rates than ever before. Experts are thinking 50 to 70 percent of voters are expected to be voting by mail. The other thing is that we just have no idea what the actual turnout is going to look like. I think people were expecting Wisconsin to be really low turnout considering the debacle that happened there. We actually saw that turnout end up kind of normal. So it's possible that the political

energy could cancel out some of these difficulties. That is NPR's Miles Parks, who covers election interference and voting. Miles, thank you so much. Thank you so much. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. I'm Ari Shapiro. It's easy to get caught up in the bad news these days.

So for the next few minutes, we want to appreciate the moments of generosity and neighborliness that many of you have told us about during this crisis. To think about how a challenge like this pandemic can bring out the best in people, we have invited Cheryl Strayed onto the program. She is author of Wild and host of the podcast Sugar Calling. Good to have you here. It's lovely to be here, Ari. Thank you. So many listeners sent us stories, anecdotes, experiences that they will never forget, and many of them have to do with people who live right nearby. To kick us off, let's listen to two of them. I'm Rachel in San Antonio. I have a neighbor who is legally blind, and he began home gardening. And in our neighborhood, the grocery stores that open curbside delivery in other parts of town were not offering it in the inner city where we live. So he went around and shared tomato plants that he had grown just as a way to encourage people and also to help make them more independent, just so they would have tomatoes during these times

when things were running at the grocery store and also just to go around and check on them. And then here's another story of neighborly kindness. Hi, this is Maya Snyder. We have a three-year-old who is unable to go to any parks right now. And our neighbor, his wife passed away in December right before all of this. And he's just been home alone by himself. And the other day he called us over and he had bought a bunch of sand for his sandbox and fixed up the swing set and put a bunch of his children's old toys around in the backyard for our daughter. So it's just really sweet. And we go over there and talk to him all the time now.

And she has a party to go to just for herself. Cheryl, these are such beautiful stories. And we got so many like this of neighbors helping each other out. Has the pandemic changed the way you think about your own neighborhood, the people who live around you? It has. And these stories are so beautiful and so much what I see going on in my neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. First of all, I see my neighbors more. Everyone's home and a lot of people are in their yards and walking around. A lot of people have put up signs with positive messages in their windows or in their yards or written with chalk on the sidewalks. And the sentiment is very much we are together, and we can get through this together. It's really uplifting.

That's wonderful. I feel the same thing in my neighborhood in Washington, DC. Here's a call that we got from someone who recently lost a loved one. My mother died on April 14th, and my brother and my sister and I were allowed to be outside of her window, and we were so grateful to the hospice nurse that sat with her and brushed her hair and held her hand and caressed her forehead, as we couldn't be there with her,

holding her while she died. But the nurse did it for us while we sang to her. And it meant so much to us. Thank you. Cheryl, this is so tough. And as we approach 100,000 deaths in the US, I know so many people are in this position of being unable to say goodbye or mourn as they would have hoped to. Do you have any advice can do to help those who are grieving is to bear witness to their sorrow by listening to them, by asking them about their loss, by asking them about their loved ones. I think it's so healing to get that opportunity to tell stories about the person who died. That's what we do at Funerals and Memorial Services. And I think that we need to keep doing that beyond today and next week and next year.

One thing I know about grief is it goes on for years. And I think our tendency is to turn away from that. And now I hope one of the good things that can come out of this collective experience is that we turn towards it and we do better with talking to people who are in grief. Yeah. I know you asked your followers on social media to share some moments of kindness that they've witnessed. What stood out to you in their responses? Well, first of all, by how many there were. And how many were about people giving what they had to give.

Whether that be they're good at baking pies and cakes and they do that and they hand them out to their friends and neighbors. Or they gather bouquets of flowers or produce baskets from gardens they've planted. Offering tutoring services to students. I was just really heartened to see how so many people thought, well, okay, I can't do everything, but I can do this thing. And I'm going to give it. That actually kind of speaks to the next story we have from a caller named Carrie in Dallas. We live on a block with quite a few kids. And since school's been out, we've all been doing our best to keep them going with their schoolwork. One of my sweet neighbors one night put some flowers together in a small bud vase, tied a pretty blue ribbon on it and

wrote just a sweet note that said to the best homeschool teacher in the world and put it on the front porch of a couple of our houses just to remind us that we've got this. It was a really sweet, kind thing for her to do. And I have the greatest neighbors and very thankful for them during this time. I just love this because I think so many people feel like trying to be a homeschool teacher makes them an inadequate employee or trying to be a good employee makes them an inadequate parent or, you know, everyone feels like they're failing at something, right? Yes, I'm among those people. I mean, I have two teenagers, an eighth grader and ninth grader, and I'm working, writing full-time, and I think that, you know, I'm not alone in feeling

like, how do we do everything inside this little box? I've had to let go of the idea of being productive at the same pace that I used to be. So what advice do you have on people being kind to themselves in these times? Well, I think, you know, one of the things in my work is there's sugar that I told people over and over again, is that the best way forward is almost always to accept what's true, to make peace with what's true, even if it's something that you wish were otherwise or different. And for me, one of the greatest kindnesses I've given myself is to say, yeah, this is hard. It's really hard for me to do everything at the level I was doing before, to focus and to be, I guess, more gentle with my days, like to say, this is what I got done today

and I'm going to live in now and accept that. Yeah. Let's listen to another story. This one comes from Alexandra in Milwaukee. Four weeks ago, my teenager pretty much fell apart, and we just weren't understanding what it was like for him to be pulled out of school. And being a teenager in love, missing prom, missing everything. And we just decided once a week on Tuesday nights, we sit down and say, how's it going? What can I do for you? Never would have done that. It's a beautiful thing. I ended up crying almost good tears after every session. This is just so wonderful. It seems like a reminder that sometimes just saying, how's it going is enough to make a big difference in a

person's life. It's huge. It's huge. And I love how Alexandra says they're missing everything. And what is happening instead is they're getting this. And I think that's a really important way to think about this. You know, when we say, how's it going? We're asking in a different context than we were before. And I think maybe listening with more heart. And I think that's the beauty of this moment is what we're missing. We're getting something else in return. Cheryl Strayed is author of Wild and host of the podcast Sugar Calling. Thank you so much for sharing these stories with us. Oh, thank you.

It's a delight to talk to you, Ari. The National Conversation with All Things Considered wrapped up this week on the radio. We want to thank our colleagues over there for making a place for listeners to share their questions and their stories over the past few months. We will have more coronavirus coverage on this podcast, of course, and on NPR.org and your local public radio station. I'm Kelly McEvers. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. We'll be back on Monday.