It's time for a voting vibe check

The NPR Politics Podcast

The episode examines the growing sense of confusion and anxiety among voters heading into the midterm elections. Reporters discuss how polit

Key takeaways

A UC San Diego survey revealed that fewer than 50% of Americans believe midterm elections will be free and fair.
The Supreme Court blocked an executive order from the Trump administration that attempted to change mail-in voting regulations.

Main topics

Voter confidence and sentiment
Mail-in voting regulations

Notable quotes

The vibes aren't great, Ashley.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how legal maneuvers and political rhetoric can

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:01) This election season, you can streamline your news intake with Up First. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight, so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know. In short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow Up First on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (0:22) The midterm elections are underway. More than half a million general election votes have already been cast. But leading up to voting, there's been some confusion and a fair bit of concern about things like mail-in voting and possible interference from the Trump administration. So let's get into it. Speaker 3 (0:41) It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. Speaker 2 (0:44) I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting. Speaker 7 (0:46) I'm Jude Jaffe-Block. I cover the intersection of government and personal data. All Speaker 3 (0:51) right, Myles, I want to start with how folks are feeling. Obviously, like mail-in ballots have been out in the world, early in-person voting is beginning. Let's start with just a vibe check. How are voters feeling about this election? I Speaker 2 (1:06) mean... The vibes aren't great, Ashley. I'm not going to lie to you. I think that is kind of the overwhelming thing I've been hearing from election officials is that in a lot of cases, the rules look very similar to the 2024 election or the 2022 election. But yet voters. are a lot more confused than they were in those elections. In some cases, they're even more scared or more concerned. There's been a lot of polling data that's come out that back this up, this anecdata that I'm kind of mentioning from election officials who hear from these voters. But there's been polling data that backs this up as well. There was a recent survey from UC San Diego that asked about a bunch of different aspects of election confidence. And the key finding was that fewer than 50 % of Americans think that the midterm elections will be free and fair elections. And so that's initially like a top. line. Kind of a shocking number when you think about it, that the majority of people are really concerned that these will be fair elections. I should say, when you dig into some of these numbers, the majority of people do trust, in basically every poll, trust their local and state election official to run a fair election. I think... People are just looking at all the different headlines that come out seemingly every day about a new change that they don't understand or a new effort from the Trump administration to investigate voters. And they're coming away from that a little bit confused on how to read it. And they just kind of look at the entire portrait. And they say they're not sure that the entire election will be fair. And then the last thing I'll say is that you can also zoom in on specific concerns. In that same UC San Diego poll, for instance, 40 percent of people said they were concerned that ICE, immigration enforcement, would be at polling places in their area. And so that's a very specific concern, one that we have no evidence to support the idea that 40 percent of polling places in the country will have ICE. And yet people are clearly getting that from somewhere. Speaker 3 (2:53) Yeah. And to be clear, like it is illegal to have armed federal officers at polling locations. But there are folks who are filing lawsuits trying to get ahead of this just in case. Jude, can you talk to us about that? Yeah, well, and this came out of the fact Speaker 7 (3:07) that there have been these mixed signals sent by federal officials, both at DHS and the FBI, refusing to rule out whether there will be federal officers making suggestions and then at other times denying. So it's been a very confusing communications landscape on this issue. And so we've seen at this point that there's actually at least three of these federal lawsuits so far, basically trying to get courts to block this from happening or put out orders that would make clear that this shouldn't be happening. One of the suits that's brought by civil rights groups and unions mentions the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which bars people from intimidating voters. And they're making the allegation that the rhetoric around the possibility of ICE having a presence at polling locations is a form of intimidation. Speaker 2 (3:56) Yeah, and I feel like you can almost see that there are two separate issues at play whenever we talk about any of these issues when it comes to elections. There's the issue of what is actually going to be happening. And in this case, is ICE actually going to be at the polling place? But what I thought was really interesting about... One of these lawsuits is it really focuses on the rhetoric as a whole separate issue that the rhetoric in and of itself can dampen potentially turnout, that our people are already scared. We see this in the polling data. And so I do think it's interesting. All of these issues have two separate parts, the actual question of what's going to happen and then how people are perceiving it. Speaker 3 (4:27) Yeah. Well, I do want to talk about the courts more, specifically my favorite court to talk about, the Supreme Court. They have been playing a big role in elections and voting laws leading up to these midterm elections.