Almost every American lives in a state that offers the option to vote early
JESSICA: Hi, this is Jessica (ph) in Denver, Colo. And I'm walking my dog Sadie (ph) around the block, which is a daily tradition we have listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. For Miles' reference, she is a large, 63-pound goldendoodle with an all-black coat. This podcast was recorded at...
SUSAN DAVIS, HOST:
12:50 p.m. on Wednesday, March 20.
JESSICA: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we will probably be walking the block yet again. OK, here's the show.
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ASHLEY LOPEZ, BYLINE: Love the dog shout out.
DAVIS: Little Miles shout out, too.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: That is amazing. That is exactly the exact perfect dog for my dog Birdy (ph) to play with. She loves, like, a mid-sized doodle, man, loves to run around with them.
DAVIS: You will never meet an unfriendly doodle.
PARKS: That is true. That is true.
DAVIS: That is just something you can bank on in this life.
PARKS: When I'm in Colorado next, I might be reaching out about a doggy playdate with Sadie.
LOPEZ: (Laughter).
DAVIS: Just FYI. Hey there, it's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Susan Davis, I cover politics.
LOPEZ: I'm Ashley Lopez, I cover voting.
PARKS: And I'm Miles Parks, I also cover voting.
DAVIS: And if you haven't already guessed it, today we're going to talk about voting. Miles, 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 just two decades ago. What's driving it?
PARKS: So basically, most of the country has made early voting - early in-person voting and mail voting - much more available. And I think this is something that as somebody who's been covering voting in the last few election cycles, I've kind of realized inherently that it was happening. 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 & Research, their founder, David Becker, a few months ago. And I 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. It came out this week.
DAVIS: 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.
PARKS: I'm just asking a question, right? I'm just asking questions, you know?
DAVIS: Yeah, just asking.
LOPEZ: (Laughter).
PARKS: 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...
DAVIS: It does help tell the story, yeah.
PARKS: ...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% of voting-eligible American citizens now live in a place that offers some form of early voting.
DAVIS: Wow.
PARKS: Whereas that number was 40% 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.
DAVIS: 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?
PARKS: 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 or 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 and when they go to vote that it's going to be difficult. Here's what Becker told me about that.
DAVID BECKER: For voters who have been told that they're going to show up at the polling place and there're going to be powerful forces there trying to prevent them from voting, or who might have - 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.
PARKS: 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 an added driver's license requirement or something like that, that you're able to meet those requirements.
DAVIS: 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?
PARKS: 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. But 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, where in 2024 they will. I would say...
DAVIS: Can we just back up. When you say that in 2016...
PARKS: Sorry.
DAVIS: I think in those states you could absentee ballot, but you needed, like, a specific reason.
PARKS: You needed to have a specific request, right? And so...
DAVIS: Yeah, so it's not that it wasn't an option, it was just a higher bar.
PARKS: 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.
DAVIS: Ashley, we're talking a lot about mail-in balloting, but that's not the only option that's expanded in this universe of voting.
LOPEZ: 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...
DAVIS: Wow.
LOPEZ: ...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.
DAVIS: 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 of the data bear that out, or has there been enough time to draw sort of a quantitative conclusion from it?
PARKS: 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...
DAVIS: Big asterisk.
PARKS: Considering...
DAVIS: Big asterisk in that election, yeah.
PARKS: But 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...
DAVIS: Yeah.
PARKS: ...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. In, 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 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.
DAVIS: 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.
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DONALD TRUMP: Mail-in voting is totally corrupt. Get that through your head.
(CHEERING)
TRUMP: It has to be. The votes - I mean, it has to be.
DAVIS: Trump has long lied and continues to lie about ballot fraud - especially about mail-in ballot fraud. And, Ashley, that does seem to have had an impact on the way Republican voters feel about casting their ballot.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And, I mean, it's something that Republicans are actually pretty worried about because, you know, it - relying 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.
DAVIS: 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...
PARKS: (Laughter).
LOPEZ: Yeah.
DAVIS: ...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.
LOPEZ: Well, not even quiet - you know, I talked to someone who ran a congressional race in Ohio for this story that I did 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 costing them, especially in the margins.
PARKS: Well, and 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. If you think about an election as a target, whether it's for a foreign adversary or a domestic actor, having everyone vote...
DAVIS: On one single day...
LOPEZ: Yeah.
PARKS: ...On one day in a 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 it's for a cyber attack - even if you just think about bad weather or bad traffic...
DAVIS: Sure, which happens a lot in November all over the country.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
PARKS: ...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 of this consternation about the New Hampshire robocall - right? - about this...
DAVIS: Yeah.
PARKS: ...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.
LOPEZ: 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.
DAVIS: 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?
PARKS: I would say if you look at the long-term trend, 2022 was - about 50% of the vote was cast on Election Day.
DAVIS: That's significant, yeah.
PARKS: 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.
DAVIS: Yeah. I wonder long-term, too, to see if the way people vote changes the way people campaign 'cause 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.
PARKS: 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.
DAVIS: For that method, yeah (laughter).
PARKS: Yeah.
LOPEZ: 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.
DAVIS: Yeah. And I would also say Democrats have sort of a - more of an infrastructure of helpers. Like...
LOPEZ: Sure.
DAVIS: ...Unions help with get-out-the-vote operations and early mail-in vote. So they seem to be investing more directly and openly in the infrastructure of early voting.
LOPEZ: Yeah, absolutely.
DAVIS: All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.
LOPEZ: I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
PARKS: And I'm Miles Parks. I also cover voting.
DAVIS: And thanks for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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