2024-10-14
13 分钟Voting looks a little different in 2024 than it did during the last presidential election. In this encore of a September episode, we explore some of the changes & challenges as voting begins, alongside NPR's voter registration guide. This episode: White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram, and voting correspondents Miles Parks & Hansi Lo Wang. The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and 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/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
This message comes from Atlantic Records with Coldplay's new album Moon Music, available now, featuring the song feels like I'm falling in love.
Rolling Stone calls Moon Music a peak Coldplay moment.
More info about Coldplay tour dates@coldplay.com dot.
Hey there.
It's the NPR Politics podcast.
I'm Deepa Shivaram.
I cover the White House.
And today on the show we want to bring you a conversation we had in September about how to run an election.
People have already started voting across the country for November's election, and we looked into the mechanics of how all of that is possible.
I talked with Miles Parks and Hansi Lo Wang, who cover voting for NPR, and I started by asking Miles what we know about how and when people are voting.
Yeah, it's always important at the top of these to say, like, this is different state by state and county by county.
Right.
But generally, I think what's really interesting when I talk to election officials is that the narrative around voting has really focused the last few years on restrictions.
After 2020 and all the expansions we saw for the COVID pandemic, a number of states did restrict and roll back some of those voting expansions, which kind of gave the vibe that voting was going to be harder in 2024.
But then when you actually look at the landscape of the US, I reported on this report from the center for Election Innovation and Research that found that 97% of voting age citizens live in places that offer some form of early voting to all voters.
So that is almost all voters have the opportunity, this election, election to vote early if they want to.
And I just think it's important to put that into context when we talk about, you know, in 2000, more than 80% of voters voted on election day.
And so there really has been a sea change in just two decades.
And so in terms of what we're going to be looking at from the electorate this year, I reached out to Charles Stewart, who's an election data expert at MIT, and I emailed him and basically said, do you have any bets on what your prediction is in terms of how people are going to be voting?
What he told me is that there has been a trend over the last two decades towards more mail voting.