The NPR Politics Podcast - How To Vote In An Election

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

In this special collaboration with NPR's Life Kit the NPR Politics team breaks down how to get ready for election day. This episode: Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, political reporter Miles Parks, and senior editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And happy Thanksgiving to you guys. Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving to you, Sue. We should note to our listeners, it is not actually Thanksgiving in the studio. We are pre-taping a couple episodes so we can spend time with our own families.

But it's always time to give thanks. It's always time to give thanks. I can taste the mashed potatoes now. I make a good turkey, I'll tell you. So we're taking the holidays to focus on a couple of episodes our friend Miles did for one of NPR's other podcasts, Life Kit. You traitor. That's what Ron said.

That's what Ron said. But no, I'm not a traitor. I'm back. I'm here. And I'm bringing all of this beautiful reporting I did with these folks to you all. So yeah, I mean, this is basically a series where NPR reporters teach you how to do stuff. And what I know how to do is I know how to vote because I've been covering voting for the last couple of years. And so this episode is focused specifically on that. So it's going to be really helpful for people who've never voted

before an election. But I also realized that a huge portion of the NPR audience does vote really consistently. And I wanted to bring something in this episode for those people, too. Well, the thing that you do that I think is so interesting in this is you're trying to tell the story of what the consequences of voting are. And you find this race, which I think highlights so perfectly how a single vote really can make a difference. Yeah. In 2017, I focused on this race in Newport News, Virginia, and it ends up deciding the entire balance of power for the Virginia House of Delegates, whether it's going to be a Republican controlled body of government or a Democrat controlled body of government. It comes down to this single race, which ends up tied. For the entire body.

Well, whoever wins this election between David Yancey and Shelley Simons is going to either make it a Democrat or Republican controlled House of Legislature. And they don't use a special election to decide this race. The way they determine this thing is basically getting everyone in a room and everyone's eyes are on a big blue bowl. Madam Vice Chair, will you give the bowl a stir? Ah. Cook in the kitchen. Okay.

There you go. Will you give the bowl a stir? What's in the bowl? They've got these two little film canisters that they bought on Amazon.com. They literally spend 25 minutes before they do it talking about, well, this is where we bought the film canisters. This is where we got the bowl. It's like borrowed from a local art museum. And then they put the names of the two candidates in the film canister.

They start around. You hear that like kind of clingy sound. And then they pull out one of the film canisters, open it up, read the name. And it's David Yancey, the Republican. So Republicans are going to control the House of Delegates in Virginia for the next two years leading up to this year's election. But the loser, Shelley Simons, could have won if just one more person had voted. And here she is. I found it really disturbing to run a serious campaign where we talked about serious issues and we went to enormous lengths to get people out to vote.

And to have that settled by a random drawing, I think was very, very disturbing. I mean, it is rare for an election to be decided by a single vote. But it's not rare, but it's not rare for elections to be decided by really, really thin margins and really consequential elections. Yeah, and there's been a handful of federal races that have been decided by a single vote. And when you go to a more local level, there have been more than dozens of them that have been decided by just a single vote. And, you know, like you said, every election, there's going to be races, congressional races even, that are decided by just a few hundred votes. At the statewide level, in 2018, 16 races decided by 10 votes or fewer. And two, again, were decided by a single vote. Wow. Okay, so you decide you want to vote. What do you do, Miles?

It seems pretty simple, but maybe it's not. It's not so simple. It's not so simple for people, especially we know that this is not something people think about in an off year. You know, this is not something they think about until a lot of times the week or the day of an election, which makes it really tough because the first step is getting registered, which in some states you have to do 30 days in advance. There's a bunch of different rules. Actually, every aspect of voting is different all over the country. We'll talk about that in a second. But as long as you're registered up to 30 days in advance, then you're safe. And this is not a super difficult process if you make a little bit of time for it. It's a five to 10 minute process

in almost all cases. Well, and think about the fact that how often do you move, right? I mean, I moved earlier this year, I lived in the same house for 10 years, and I'm registered to vote in the state I live in. But if I were to show up to the same polling place with my new address, I wouldn't be allowed to. So I actually have to update my voter registration, which I haven't done yet. I'm realizing I moved 10 months ago. And this is the time that I can't believe that I am the voting reporter. And I'm realizing my voting registration is not up to date currently. But this is this is the big thing, too, is election officials are humans and they are dealing with data and data entry and making sure everyone's registration is is correct. And so if you are turning in your registration like a month or a month and a half before the election, let's say before the presidential election, a presidential primary next year, that is when these humans are inundated with everyone else's registration. So the chances of your registration maybe being off by one number or having some sort of error,

despite it still being a low chance, you can really decrease the odds of something like that happening by doing it early at a time when these election officials have a little bit more time, and they aren't completely inundated by the thousands of other people who are hounding them. So if someone figures out how to register to vote and then they register, the other question is understanding the ballot. Yeah, understanding what's on the ballot. A lot of times you go in, people will show up like next year for a presidential race and they know for sure which presidential candidate that they're all in on, right? And then they show up and then there's like three pages or four pages of questions about

maybe it's a Senate thing or maybe it's even farther down ballot. And they're like, who is the sanitation commissioner? Offices you've never even heard of. I didn't even know we had one of those. What did that person do? And what's the difference between these two people? And then there's amendments, you know, questions like, should we legalize X or Y? There's all these things that can be really overwhelming when you show up and don't understand.

But there's a lot of things you can do to kind of mitigate that. It is kind of asking a lot of people. I mean, voting does put a lot of pressure on the individual voter to figure out how to be informed about all those issues, which is in many cases, I think, especially in the case of ballot referendums, is really hard to do sometimes because they can be written in ways that are hard for voters to understand, or it's unclear if the yes vote is getting you what you want or the no vote is the way to go. And you have states like California who have been sort of front runners in the ballot referendum issue. And in 2016, there was actually a song to help people understand the ballot referendums.

Ooh, I'm kind of here for this. I know. It's catchy. 17 propositions. That's a lot. Wait, so they go through all of them? Yeah. Which is a great public service. What is this, like a meatloaf 13-minute ballad? Five minutes and 16 seconds.

It is a five minute and 16 second song just to explain ballot propositions. I think there's one tip that is really interesting that I got actually from a producer on the Life Kit podcast. Her name's Claire. And she mentioned we're in a meeting and she's like, honestly, I voted for the first three times and didn't realize I could bring in notes with me. I thought I had to memorize everything about the entire ballot. But there's all sorts of little rules like that, that you can bring in a newspaper that you've taken notes on, or you can bring in a lot of jurisdictions actually allow you to print out like a sample ballot. And so you could fill out the ballot. If you're going to a polling place, you can still print something out and have notes that you've done at home and bring it in. So you're not trying to rack your brain in a like what feels like a high pressure environment. You've got the line of people waiting for their spot. But in general, it doesn't have to be like a pop quiz. It's not like a SAT situation.

That's smart. Okay, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about what happens when it's actually time to vote. and one-on-one coaching in all 50 states, helping businesses get online, connect with new customers, and work more productively. Learn more at google.com slash grow. Think of MPR's Life Kit as that friend who always has great advice about everything from how to invest to how to get a great workout. We bring you tools to help you get it together. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Listen and subscribe to Life Kit. And we're back and we're going to talk about what happens when people show up to vote. But before we do that, it does seem worth noting that there are a ton of Americans who don't vote. Yeah, it's a choice.

We do not have compulsory voting here. It's a freedom of choice in this country whether people do go vote. There is a lot of times debates over ideas that could make it easier for people to vote. One thing you hear that always comes up in these conversations is, are election days a Tuesday? And a lot of people have to work on Tuesdays. Like, shouldn't election day be a national holiday? Or should it be on a weekend? Would it be better to have it on a Sunday? I mean, those kind of debates you do hear just from election advocates say that would encourage more people to vote. And the question of do people want to vote but have barriers to getting there? I could go on it through an entire rabbit hole on Tuesday voting because this started because we were an agrarian society that people actually had to go to the county seat and travel mostly by horse and buggy at that time. And they couldn't

do it on a weekend because they had to go to church on Sundays and they needed the day to travel. So they did Tuesday. So it's now the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, because it was also after harvest season. The other thing about this too, though, is that when you talk about making election day a national holiday or putting it on a weekend, I think it gets a little oversimplified in terms of who are the people who would actually be helped by making Election Day a national holiday? It's like the working class folks, the people who would be helped by making a weekend or people who work nine to five jobs. What about the lower income people who are working service jobs? Like when you make something a holiday, public transportation is going to be affected by that. How is that going

to affect lower income people who have to take the bus to get to their polling place? It's a little bit more nuanced than just saying like if we did move Election Day, it would immediately make it so much easier for everybody. But is Election Day still the same because states have done so many things to change the way people vote now. Well, that's the argument, right, is that Election Day as a concept is kind of a myth in most places because most states allow some form of early voting, whether that's early voting by absentee, whether that's early voting in person. There are a lot of ways that if you decide 30 days, 60 days before an election that you don't want to vote on that Tuesday in November, you can actually find a way to do it. Yeah. And the highest participating states are the states out West that have adopted vote by mail. Some states are only vote by mail now, right? Oregon is one.

Oregon is one. Washington State as well. Washington State as well. So those places have upwards of 80 plus percent participation when 60 percent is generally pretty high for the country at large in a presidential election. So that's an interesting thing. Of course, there are some security issues that vote by mail raises that they've tried to address in those places. There's also some basic rights that voters have that I'm not sure all voters know. Like one of the things you talk about in the podcast is an official notes that if you have a mail-in ballot, the date that counts is the date it's postmarked, not the date it's

received. In some places it's different. Again, that's what I was going to say is just the bottom line with all of this is make a plan. This should not be a morning of Election Day thing. This is something that you need to go and take 15 minutes, 20 minutes. If you want to vote and look at your secretary of state's website or look at your county elections website or just call them and ask, what are the options for me to vote and what do I need to bring with me if I'm going to vote in person, whether it's photo ID, whether it's not photo ID? This is all stuff that you run into trouble when it's a last minute situation. Oh, I don't have transportation to get there or I didn't realize it was going to close at six instead of eight or something like that. Miles, how concerned are the election officials

you interviewed concerned about the issue of voter suppression, both like broadly and in the election we're looking at right now, 2020? I think they're concerned about voter suppression as a concept, but that's something that has been around for decades, right? And so that's not necessarily a new problem. I think the thing that they're honestly more concerned about is the misinformation barrage around the concept of voter suppression. The fact that social media, I see it on my Facebook all the time. I honestly, I see friends of mine posting things about elections or about how you vote that just frankly are not true.

And so election officials are really worried about not only the actual act of voter suppression, but about this idea in people's minds that voting is hard. We have data, we did a poll, NPR and Marist College did a poll last year that basically said, how hard is it for you to vote? How long does it take you to get to your polling place? And then once you're there, how long do you wait in line? The vast majority, more than 90% of people, it's really easy. So a lot of this, I don't want to say it's made up in people's head. People have very real fears, but those fears can be amplified by nefarious actors. Most people vote without issue in this country. Is that fair to say?

Yes, that is fair to say based on the data. All right, we're going to leave it there. But if you want to hear Miles' episode and all other offerings from LifeKit, you can find it at npr.org slash LifeKit. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. And happy Thanksgiving. Thank you.