(Almost) everything you wanted to know about politics (but were afraid to ask)
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What is the purpose of this special episode and who are the hosts?
This is Iraglass. On this American life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize that it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right. Because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts.
It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamar Keith, I cover politics.
I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting.
And I'm Mara Lyason, senior national political correspondent.
This is a special episode of the podcast because we're recording it with a virtual audience. Now we're going to answer questions from our virtual audience here. We've also got questions that were sent in ahead of time. And let me just say that out of those pre-submitted questions, the topic that probably came up the most was election integrity, including vote by mail. So let's start there. It is convenient. That Miles Parks is a co-host of this podcast and also knows all the things. Uh, Dot wrote in asking, Will I be able to vote by mail and have it counted? While Kathleen wondered, how worried should we be about mail in voting? Uh Miles, we got a ruling from the Supreme Court this week that helps answer those questions, right?
Yes. I mean the answer is voting by mail will look the same in twenty twenty six as it did in twenty twenty four. That Trump's executive order attempting to add all these new rules and regulations to how people can vote by mail has been blocked for this election cycle at least. So let's just start there. That's an important level set that I uh genuinely as I cover this stuff every single day. And the last couple of weeks have been very confusing for me. They have been very confusing for For the entire American public. I talk to voting officials every day. This is basically all the questions that they're getting are about voting by mail and then broadly just federal interference in the process, right? So that's there's one part of it is that the executive order is not going into effect.
So it's going to look the same as previous election cycles. That isn't the same as people's confidence in it. There are real signals that it's possible that fewer people will choose to vote by mail this election cycle. There was a recent poll that just came out this week from UC San Diego that asked a bunch of different questions about trust in elections. And one of them was about specifically voting methods. And it asked about all these different how people vote and which gives you the most confidence in the accuracy. And returning your ballot by mail was under five percent. The amount of people who said voting by mail is the the thing I'm most confident in versus early voting versus voting on election day versus using a drop box.
And you
know, to Democrats, what that tells you is that even if Trump didn't prevail in the Supreme Court, he did achieve one of his main objectives, which is to reduce people's confidence, not just in mail and voting, but in the integrity of elections. The more people don't trust the results, as Donald Trump has said many times throughout his entire career, any election he doesn't win is by definition rigged and fake and and fraudulent. Uh that's something that he also wanted to accomplish, which I think he has. Aaron Powell
Definitely. We just don't know if that's going to advantage him, right? Because I think one of the other things is that the people who are most helped by these sort of by accessible voting methods are low propensity voters, which are Trump has done very well with those voters, right? And so I guess it's very unclear with the political.
Right.
Even though
he firmly believes that voting by mail helps Democrats. He believes that. But there really isn't evidence to that. Is there, Miles? There isn't. There
isn't. And frankly, the people who are most motivated to vote are going to vote no matter what method is available to them. And that those people are Democrats this election cycle, it seems like
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