The NPR Politics Podcast - Good News: Voting Is, Mostly, Getting Easier. Here's How.

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

New data shows that voting in America has gotten easier over the past two decades. More voters have the ability to cast a ballot before Election Day, with the majority of U.S. states now offering some form of early in-person voting and mail voting to all voters. Read the story.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and voting correspondent Ashley Lopez.Our producers are Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hi, this is Jessica in Denver, Colorado, and I'm walking my dog Sadie around the block, which is a daily tradition we have listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. For Miles's reference, she is a large 63-pound golden doodle with an all-black coat. This podcast was recorded at 12.50 p.m. on Wednesday, March 20th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we will probably be walking the block yet again.

Okay, here's the show. Love a dog shout-out. A little Miles shout-out, too. That is amazing. That is actually the exact perfect dog for my dog Birdie to play with. She loves, like, a mid-sized doodle, man. Loves to run around with them. You will never meet an unfriendly doodle. That is true.

That is just something you can bank on in this life. When I'm in Colorado next time, I'll be reaching out about a doggy play date with Sadie. Just FYI. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.

And I'm Myles Parks. I also cover voting. And if you haven't already guessed it, today we're going to talk about voting. Myles, you've been reporting on some new research that looks at how much easier it is to vote in America today than it was even, but there hasn't actually been good data showing over the last 25 years how early voting has gotten more available. I talked to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, their founder, David Becker, a few months ago and asked him if they had this data. He was like, no, but it actually would be kind of useful. So they started working on this report. Can we just pause for a second there? Because you're too humble to brag,

but I'll brag for you. But this research was prompted in part by your very request. Just asking a question, right? I'm just asking a question. But I did. I asked David, and he was like, I have people who could do that. And so they put together this report. And I would actually urge people also to go to NPR.org.

We put together some really cool graphics showing over time how the country has changed with access to early mail voting. But the bottom line number that is so striking from this report is that 97 percent of voting eligible American citizens now live in a place that offers some form of early voting, whereas that number was 40 percent in 2000. So that just shows you kind of – and we're expecting in 2004, that more and more voters will take advantage of those early voting options. We should note there'll also be a link to that story in today's episode notes. People can find it there. But how do you square this with all of the reporting and all of the new laws that have been passed, particularly in red states that have seemed to or at least been presented as making it harder for people to vote? I would say this adds to that. It doesn't make

it untrue that many Republican states have in the last decade added new voter ID requirements. In some places, banned drop boxes are changed. The rules around voting by mail. I asked Becker about this. And if anything, this data kind of works to counter the narrative that because of those restrictions, voting for the average voter will be hard. You know, America has a long history of voter suppression. That's true. And that makes it so the average voter who probably has seen headlines saying your state may have added these sorts of voting restrictions gives them the impression that when they register to vote, when they go to vote, that's going to be difficult. Here's what Becker told me about that.

For voters who've been told that they're going to show up at the polling place and they're going to be powerful forces there trying to prevent them from voting, or whose family members might have experienced that in the past, it's not their fault for thinking that voting might be harder than it is. Honestly, they're one of the reasons I did this report so i would just say to voters the assumption is you know 97 of people live in a place where you can vote this way but some of the rules on the margins may have changed so you're definitely going to want to check with your local election official or with your state election official to make sure you know if there's been added driver's license requirement or something like that that you're able to meet those requirements. One of the questions I have for you is looking forward a little bit to 2024,

specifically in the swing states, states where we're going to be watching very closely, not just in the presidential, but down the ballot in a lot of ways. In that orbit of states, has there been any really dramatic changes? Michigan and Pennsylvania are the two places that I look at, not since 2020. Honestly, 2020 was kind of an aberration in that almost every single state did something to make voting easier. The thing I've been going back to is comparing things to 2016, which is the last election that Donald Trump won. And there are a few striking differences in a number of battleground states, just in terms of how easy it is for people to vote. Michigan and Pennsylvania both did not offer early voting or absentee voting to all

voters, whereas in 2024, they will. I would say- Can we just back up when you say that in 2016? I think in those states, you could absentee ballot, but you needed like a specific reason. So it's not that it wasn't an option. It was just a higher bar. Exactly. Exactly. Not available for all voters is how the report puts it. And normally, that wouldn't make that big of a difference in terms of we know these sorts of voting methods don't have a clear partisan breakdown or haven't historically had a partisan breakdown. When they start to matter is when you think about Donald Trump and other Republicans who have worked to demonize mail voting, who have worked in some cases to tell their voters not to vote early and to vote on election day. Then when

you look at states that are offering these sorts of early voting in ways that they didn't in previous election cycles, you could see this become a pretty big advantage for Democrats. Actually, we were talking a lot about mail-in balloting, but that's not the only option that's expanded in this universe of voting. Yeah, I think it's really interesting because mail voting obviously has gotten a lot of attention since 2020, and that's mostly because of the politics of it, right? It's been more contentious thanks to some election misinformation leading up to, I should say, and definitely after the 2020 election. But the expansion of in-person early voting is something that I found really interesting. You know, in the report, it says that in the 2000 election, I should say, only 24 states offered all their voters the opportunity to vote

early in person. And today for the upcoming 2024 general election, 46 states and Washington, D.C. will offer voters the opportunity to vote early in person. It's only like four states, Alabama, Mississippi, Delaware and New Hampshire, if I remember that correctly, don't have this option for their voters. So it's almost universal in the country, which I think is a pretty big deal. It would seem to me obvious that if you expand the option of ways to vote, it would naturally increase voter participation. The lower the threshold, the higher the participation. But does the research or the data bear that out? Or has there been enough time to draw sort of a quantitative conclusion from it? I mean, if you're going to just specifically take recent

elections as a good example, I think it is starting to bear it out. I mean, 2020, considering that there was a pandemic going on, there was no COVID vaccine yet. I think inherently the assumption would have been that that would be a lower turnout election because it involved in some cases, risking your health to go out and vote. People were really scared at that time. And yet it was the highest turnout election in modern history. I think points partially to how polarized the electorate was at that time. We know polarization tends to drive turnout, but also voting was more accessible. You can see when you look at these graphics, how much easier even states that didn't allow any mail voting allowed it in 2020 for all voters. Places like Alabama allowed all voters to use COVID as an excuse to vote by mail in a way that they didn't and will not in 2024. So 2020 is an example of how this can help turnout. And I think 2022, we saw more voters move back to voting on election day, but we still saw kind of the

long-term trend. If you look at the last 20 years, more and more voters are back to voting on Election Day, but we still saw kind of the long-term trend. If you look at the last 20 years, more and more voters are moving towards voting early and voting by mail. I think we can expect that to continue. And especially in local elections, in off-year elections, research has found that offering more options to vote and easier ways to vote affects off-year elections, especially more than the kind of higher turnout presidential elections. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about this when we get back.

And we're back. And we can't talk about voting without talking about the politics that surround it. For one thing, mail balloting has had one very high profile opponent. Mail-in voting is totally corrupt. Get that through your head. It has to be the votes. I mean, it has to be. Trump has long lied and continues to lie about ballot fraud, especially about mail in ballot fraud. And actually, that does seem to have had an impact on all your voters to vote just one day on Election Day in person makes elections really risky, especially when elections are really close. And that's because, you know, even some bad weather in some key districts could make a difference. And more importantly, it actually costs the party a lot of money to constantly target their voters throughout all of early voting. So the Republican National Committee has actually been pretty worried about this for a while. I mean, as of last year, they were rolling out this campaign called Bank Your Vote, which is aimed at getting Republican voters more comfortable with the idea of mail-in ballot voting as well as in-person early voting. And, you know, for now, it seems like, in my opinion, a pretty toothless initiative because it relies on their candidates to get this message to their voters,

which, as you mentioned, is not going so well because their most visible candidate, Donald Trump, isn't really cooperating. But it is a liability that Republicans have been seeing in elections for a while now, which is like just their voters are not comfortable voting by mail. I will say that I've also talked to Republican campaign managers for House and Senate races, and Donald Trump's messaging on this makes them want to pull their hair out because down-ballot campaigns rely heavily on, especially traditionally, Republicans have done well with mail-in voting. And this has been something that has caused a lot of quiet consternation inside the party. Well, not even quiet. You know, I talked to someone who ran a congressional race in Ohio for this story

that I did on on Bank Your Vote, and she blamed the early vote on why she lost. I mean, like they will say it out loud like this is this is costing them, especially in the margins. Well, I think the great irony, right, which is something Becker said when I talked to him for this story, is that trying to tell people not to vote by mail and not to vote early for security reasons doesn't make any sense because early voting and mail voting actually make elections in a lot of ways more secure. one vote on one day in an eight-hour period, having all these people going to the same place at the same exact time makes it for a much easier target than if you have voting, whether that's for a cyber attack, even if you just think about bad weather or bad traffic, which happens a lot, right? And so I think spreading it out over all these different modes and all of these different times, I was also thinking about, you know, there was all this consternation about the New Hampshire robocall, right? About this robocall that told people

actually voting, you shouldn't vote tomorrow. Part of the reason misinformation like that is effective in a place like New Hampshire is because there is no early voting or mail voting available to all voters. And so if you think about a robocall like that would not really work in California where people have 11 days of early voting. If you tell them, do not vote tomorrow on Friday, they can vote Saturday. They can vote the following Monday. They can vote Tuesday. And so I think even misinformation can be less effective when you have more different modes and ways to vote. And I'm going to yes and you here, Miles, and say it also makes elections run smoother. I've had election officials tell me like early voting gives you a better

picture of like how interested people are in an election. So it's easier for them to guess how many ballots they'll need on election day. If there's any problems with machines, they'll figure that out during early voting. And that is a less risky time to do it because if you have all your voters coming in on election day, which is the last day to vote, it's harder to solve problems for them. And it causes long lines, which does lead to people sort of walking away and just not voting altogether because that was the last opportunity they had. Is there a sense of how much of the vote will be cast by Election Day this year based off of this trend? Is it a quarter, a plurality, close to half? Do we have any sense of how much more this behavior is shifting in whatever way you may vote, but prior to election day?

I would say if you look at the long-term trend, 2022 was about 50% of the vote was cast on election day. In 2020, that number was less than a third, roughly like 31% was cast on election day. I think it's fair to assume somewhere in the middle there, because in a higher turnout election, more people probably will be tempted to use the early voting options and things like that. So I think looking at the long-term trends, expecting somewhere between a third and a half of voters voting on Election Day and somewhere over 50% of voters casting their ballots early is probably a good bet. Yeah. I wonder long term, too, to see if the way people vote changes the way people campaign, because you often I think campaigns are decided like the six week run up to Election Day.

But in so many cases now with early voting, a lot of the ballot has been cast. Like, does it backload in some ways campaigns and where they message and pressure test voters to the start of early voting versus Election Day. One would assume how Trump campaigns and how the result of Trump's election this year could potentially have a huge impact on whether people decide to keep banging the drum on telling their voters not to vote early or to vote by mail if he loses in 2024. I think that might be the death knell for that as a campaign strategy. Yeah. I would say especially locally and especially Democrats do that. They do message to their voters to get out

early or to turn in their mail ballots early. You do see that. It's just it's you're mostly seeing it on a local level and you're mostly seeing it in one party. Yeah. And I'd also say Democrats have sort of a more of an infrastructure ofers, like unions help with get out the vote operations and early mail-in votes. So they seem to be investing more directly and openly in the infrastructure of early voting. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And I'm Miles Parks. I also cover voting. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.