The NPR Politics Podcast - Our Changing Democracy: Non-Partisan Primaries, Internet Voting

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Closed primaries — where only members of that political party can vote — are effectively the final say in the vast majority of House of Representatives elections. Can open primary elections help incentive candidates to work toward consensus?And 300,000 people voted via the web in 2020. And, yes, the tech makes elections experts really worried.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, voting correspondent Ashley Lopez, and voting correspondent Miles Parks.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Elena Moore. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.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 Melissa from Kannapolis, North Carolina, and I am currently driving to Rock Hill, South Carolina Carolina to meet up with my very best friend from college. This podcast was recorded at 1.08 p.m. on Thursday, September 21st of 2023. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will have enjoyed a great day of coffee, shopping, and good conversation.

Okay, here's the show. Love the Carolinas. Underrated states, I think, actually. I think both of them. Top five states for me. Top five. Yeah, I would say so. I went to school there and I remember driving through a lot and just finding like every inch of that state really pleasant. Yeah. Really beautiful. Well, hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Ashley Lopez. I also cover voting. And I am sure it doesn't come as a surprise to all you listeners that Americans are often rather unhappy with how our political systems function or do not function when it comes to

the electoral college, when it comes to making maps, when it comes to casting ballots, frankly, the whole process of voting. So today on the show, how do you fix this system? And are there risks to the alternatives? Ashley, I want to start with you because you have been reporting on the primary process. And we should point out that most of the time primaries are divided by political parties, which it seems has somewhat helped calcify our politics. So help us understand why do we have the current system as we do? Why are most of these divided up by political parties? Sure. So we run primaries this way, like mostly because 100 years ago, candidates for general elections were chosen by like party bosses in smoke-filled rooms,

and the public was pretty much left out of it. So reformers and activists came in and helped get rid of that system and that opened up the process to voters. But the parties, I guess, like basically in an effort to make peace with that change, which was a pretty big shift of power for them, they basically took over the process. So what we have now is mostly that in every state there's a system where parties like theory, hold the primaries, but they're actually run by public officials. And if you have, here in Texas, like you have to pick a party's ballot. So even if you're an independent, you have to like every year sort of like pick a side when you're going to go vote. Yeah, so it like kind of just depends where you live. But I would say most

people live in a state where like parties, in theory, hold their primaries. So what problems does that system cause? Well, I mean, as you can imagine, this isn't ideal for voters who are independent, you know, not registered with a party. And independents and unaffiliated voters are a huge segment of our potential voting population. States like Colorado, it's the largest voting bloc. And that's only becoming more of an issue with like Gen Z and millennial voters, you know, younger voters who are more independent compared to like generations before them, which means that fewer people are voting in primaries. And because of redistricting and how rare, like actually competitive elections are, especially when you look at Congress, that means fewer people are having a say in who eventually becomes the representative. There's a group called Unite America. They actually ran the numbers on this.

And they found out that in 2020, only 10% of eligible Americans nationwide cast ballots in primary elections in like about 83% of congressional seats. So that's 10% picking 83% of congressional seats. And yeah, that's kind of wild. And the worry here is that so few voters and mostly party loyals are picking candidates. And that means that the candidates themselves are becoming less representative and in some cases more extreme. And it's I feel like it's not abstract either. Like, I feel like people are definitely starting to feel this. I was just looking through some poll numbers, some recent poll numbers in this AP poll from a couple of months ago, and it found that 12% of Americans feel like

the government is representing them either very well or extremely well. 12%. 10% of people say democracy is working very well or extremely well. So you basically, what you said, Ashley, is basically a small number of voters are picking the vast majority of members of Congress. Well, a small number of Americans like that, a very small number of voters are picking the vast majority of members of Congress. Well, a small number of Americans like that, a very small number of Americans. I mean, in reality, this also leads to a situation where you have often very extreme, very partisan candidates that come out of this process. You know, I'm thinking back to the Pennsylvania governor's race, where you had Doug Mastriano on the Republican side, not a candidate who appealed at all to the sort of independent middle of the road Pennsylvanians. And you see that time and again as a result of this primary process.

Yeah. And advocates in this space say like that is why it's so hard for either side to either to compromise on things, because their audience, their voter, I should say, their electorate, the people that they are talking to and trying to get votes from are in sort of either the party loyal factions of their party and pretty much everyone else isn't as important for them when they think of like, you know, an upcoming election because the general is not usually an issue. So it's hard for people to compromise. And this is why a lot of people, when they look at our system, feel like it's failing them in some sort of way, or at the very least is not representing them or meeting their needs. Well, it's interesting, too, because, Ashley, your story did a really nice job of kind of explaining that there isn't a whole lot of data on some of these new voting. Like,

we are going to talk, I think, over the next few months about all sorts of different, our voting team is looking at all sorts of different ways that people are looking about reforming the election system. And a lot of these, there's like conflicting data on exactly what effect it has on polarization or how radical or extreme candidates are. But I do think for most voters, it does make logical sense that if you have to appeal to a wider group of people, then the opinions that you're going to push or the policy positions you're going to have would naturally kind of lend themselves to being more moderate. So, Ashley, let's talk in more depth and about what your reporting found. There are some states that have nonpartisan primaries, and presumably that is what it sounds like, and it is open to to to candidates of any political ilk. But help us understand how these primaries work.

Yeah. So right now we currently have five states that run federal or statewide nonpartisan primaries. Right. So that's California, Nebraska, Washington, Alaska and Louisiana. So pretty big like swath of. Yeah. Like kind of very different states there. And in these systems, how it works is all candidates from all parties are listed on the same ballot and voters can vote for any candidate regardless of party. And depending where you live, like either the top two or the top, you know, four vote getters, or Louisiana has a kind of different system where if you win the majority outright, there's not another election.

And then, but if you, if you are like one of the top two or top four vote gators in that system, you move on to the general election. And proponents of these systems say they force candidates to run differently by appealing to not just their party, which was what we were talking about, the sort of system that everyone is in right now, but instead they have to appeal to independents and maybe even voters from the opposite party in order to get enough votes to move to their top two or top four. And it also, you know, creates competitive elections where they might not exist otherwise. For example, in deep blue California, having two Democrats in a general election is far more competitive than if you have a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot as well. Ashley, is there an objective sense that these systems are better than the primaries that are conducted by political parties?

Or do they create new problems in and of themselves? Well, in terms of new problems, you know, in the scenario I just laid out about California, like imagine being a Republican in that state, right? Like you have two Democrats on the general, like you probably are not going to want to vote if you don't have a member of your own party to vote on the ballot. And then there's the fact that we actually don't have much evidence yet that these systems create more representative or moderate candidates. You know, so far we know that they do run differently, maybe in a more moderate style, but the outcomes of like what kind of candidates this produces is the studies are pretty mixed. It might be that we don't have enough states to draw data from or not enough time yet. I mean, California has had this for about a decade,

so who knows? But, you know, I will say experts have said time and again that like this is not working. And so experimentation will have some drawbacks and, you know, advocates in like the, you know, I'm sure Miles has talked to these people, like in the reformer space, they're like, take some chances, like the kinks will get worked out later because the way we have the system set up right now, that is definitely not working. And

it does have a ton of like drawbacks for voters. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. And let's turn to another aspect of how we vote and attempts to change how we vote, and that is Internet voting. Miles, you had this stat that some 300,000 people are already voting through the Internet, which I will say is wild. And I did not know that that occurs. So why don't we just begin there? Who votes online as is right now with this current system? And why do they vote online? 2022 election. But basically, most people have to use a paper ballot, have to either mail it in or vote in person. But quietly, the option to vote over the internet is offered in more than 30 states to voters who are either in the military or who are living overseas. And then in some cases, in a few other states, it's also offered to some members of the disability community. And so

basically, this option is offered in some places to voters who traditionally have had a really hard time, you know, getting to a polling place or being able to use the mail. You think about somebody in a war zone or somebody who's living in a really remote place. But the numbers over the last few election cycles have really ticked up to the point where, you know, over 300,000 people, that's from federal data that we were looking through. That is a really big number. So how do they vote by the internet? I mean, presumably there's no like online portal. In some cases there is. Some states do have an online portal for these voters to like go in and just like vote and then hit submit, literally. And in a lot of cases, it's email, that they're actually sending an email that has a copy of

their identification as well as their ballot and a thing where they sign saying, lot of cases, it's email, that they're actually sending an email that has a copy of their identification as well as their ballot and a thing where they sign saying, I'm giving up my right to a secret ballot. And then they email it in. Some cases, it's fax. All things in voting very kind of different in each state, but there's a lot of different ways it happens. And are states legally required to provide this option to voters? In many cases, they are. And what's really interesting, a lot of these laws that require this Internet voting option to be offered to military voters, for instance, many of these laws were passed before 2000 or before 2010, like at a time when... The Internet was not so ubiquitous. It was like it wasn't ubiquitous and people were not nearly as scared of it.

I mean, you have to think about like in 2004, everyone was just thinking it was like the greatest thing since sliced bread. We thought that in a couple of years we were going to want to be doing everything online and there's nothing really bad that can come from it. Really, the understanding in America of cybersecurity risks at the time these laws were passed was very, very basic. Now, essentially, every election security expert, every cybersecurity expert is pretty much unanimously against widespread internet voting. I talked to William Adler, who's at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and here's what he said. Basically, every election security expert agrees that we should not have lots of people voting over the internet. The DHS, FBI, the National Academies of Sciences, they've all agreed on this point.

And there's really more agreement on this point than almost anything else in election security. The idea of like internet voting, I can just imagine to the election security world is like probably the scariest thing possible because there's even like, if I remember asking an election security expert once, like what the ideal was,

and they said paper and pen because that is just like how scared of technology they are in like the security space because it's just like you know it's such a wild card so I am not surprised to hear that at all yeah so miles I want to play devil's advocate here a bit because I think of so many things I do here on my little handy iPhone. You can online bank on your phone. You can, I mean, I can correspond with my son's pediatrician, right? And like, we presume that it is trustworthy, that it is secure. So why would voting fundamentally be so different? And if so, why can't someone figure out how to make it secure?

There's a lot of technical answers to this, but I think the biggest one that election security experts talk about that makes voting so different from all the other transactions that we're talking about here is your right to a secret ballot. So when you talk about banking on your phone, if your paycheck comes in wrong or you sentence somebody money and it's the wrong amount, you are going to know it because you're going to see it on your bank statement and they're going to know it because they're going to see it on their transaction history, right? Whereas it's the exact opposite in voting. When you vote, you are not supposed to be able to ever check that that ballot came in the way you marked it. So you send it on your phone and you hit submit. You're not supposed

to be able to go check that it was not altered in transit or else you open up this whole potential for vote coercion or all there's a whole slew of issues that come with eliminating the secret ballot. So that your right to anonymity and to the secret ballot is what makes the technical problem of securing this so difficult, because there's just not a great way yet for you to be completely positive when you hit submit on your phone that the thing that the election official is getting is the same choices that you put in, that it wasn't altered in some way. So, Miles, I understand the security risks that you're

outlining. But at the same time, there is often a push, particularly amongst progressives, activists, that democracy needs to be accessible to all, and that there needs to be increased access to the ballot, and that sometimes it's very hard for people to vote. And so how do you counter or how do you weigh the risks compared to the accessibility benefits of online voting? I think it's important to understand that when we talk about voting, there is always in almost every election system, you trade off accessibility for security. Like generally, that is like one of the truisms in voting is that as you make a system more accessible, it usually becomes less secure. And as you make system more accessible, it usually becomes less secure.

And as you make it more secure, it usually becomes less accessible. And so there are constantly in all different facets, all these different ways that election officials and government officials are trying to weigh these two things and make your system more accessible while we're also at a time of intense distrust of elections in the U.S. And so what election security folks say is like, yes, we want to make the system as accessible as possible. But, you know, we were all there the last few years. There is a huge population in this country who already doesn't trust election results, even though they're on paper and in many cases were hand counted in recounts and audited. And so adding the online voting aspect of this, where it's really hard to convince people that election results are what you say they are, it kind of throws a wrench.

All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Ashley Lopez. I also cover voting. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.