Separating election facts from fiction
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We are down to the wire in the presidential race and polling across the board has nearly every swing state in a statistical tie, meaning the election may come down to a couple thousand votes. Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign is exuding confidence, as is former President Donald Trump's. It could go either way.

But if Trump loses, like he did in 2020, he is ready to sell a story that he has been spinning for months. Because they cheat. That's the only way we're going to lose, because they cheat. They cheat like hell. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They are a threat to democracy. The Democrats are a threat to democracy. That's the real threat. Under my plan, America...

Consider this. No matter who wins, in the coming days, we are going to hear a lot more from Donald Trump and his allies about the results. If history is any guide, we can expect a mix of misleading information, rumors, and outright lies. From NPR, I'm Scott Dutrow.

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It's Consider This from NPR. We're back with voting correspondent Myles Parks. Hey, Myles. Hey, Scott. Let us start with what seems to be the most common talking point on the right when it comes to the election. Let's hear it. A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. Myles, we have talked about this before, but we need to talk about it again because we keep hearing it. What are the facts?

not the framing, the facts when it comes to non-citizen voting. Every single study has found it to be incredibly rare. A recent audit of Georgia's voter rolls, for instance, found 20 confirmed non-citizens out of more than 8 million voters. That being said, Scott, it does a

Occasionally happen. People do occasionally slip through the cracks, whether intentionally or by accident. A person was recently arrested, for instance, in Michigan for being a non-citizen and voting. But that's the thing. And that's what election officials always go back to is that there is a powerful deterrent here. If you are a non-citizen and you vote, that is illegal. And if you are arrested, that can risk your path to citizenship, which seems like act like a pretty powerful deterrent. Consequences, serious consequences. Yeah.

Still, a lot of conservative commentators and Republican lawmakers are echoing this narrative. There's a number of states that are not requiring proof of citizenship when illegals or non-citizens register to vote. We know that's happening. That is the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, Speaker to Face the Nation,

Miles, what's the reality here? It's a little bit complicated because Johnson is right. Federal law prohibits most states from requiring proof of citizenship to vote. That being said, it's not like states have no idea who's on their voter rolls. The vast majority of people register to vote using either a driver's license or a Social Security number. These are agencies that do have access to citizenship data. So government officials have the ability to check the citizenship process.

for most of the people on their voter rolls. And if they have a reason to believe that one of these people has cast a ballot illegally, they can refer that person to prosecution. That's the other important part here. Elections have records. There are ways to find this stuff out. Do we know how... You mentioned there have been a couple of recent arrests. Do we know the process of how those people were flagged? After the election...

Election officials go back through their voter rolls, look and see if there are people who have indicated they're non-citizens, and you'll usually see a wave of arrests. But still, when it comes to a widespread, systemic, organized plan to do this, there's just no evidence of that. We have not seen that in the past. It's never been found, right. Why then does this narrative of non-citizen voting, this false narrative...

help Trump's broader false claims about election integrity? I think the sense from election officials I've talked to is that the election narratives of 2020 were starting to get a little bit stale. And so when you look ahead at 2024, what is the major political point of

on the right right now. It is immigration. And so what experts see is basically a marrying of these two narratives. You've got an issue that is very politically salient, and you've got Trump trying to kind of activate people on that. The other thing I'll note in terms of why this is a successful election conspiracy theory is, like I mentioned, it does happen occasionally. Every election cycle, you'll see this. A few people get arrested for this. And so it's much harder to debunk a narrative like that that actually has

a little bit of truth to it as opposed to voting machines are being controlled by a satellite or something. Yeah. Let's talk about a different narrative that we've been hearing a lot of lately. This is this idea of cheating. There is, I think, some amount of cheating that takes place. It's hard because when you have mail-in ballots and...

So that's Elon Musk, billionaire Trump supporter, who has pushed a lot of these baseless theories, especially on his social media platform, X, which used to be known as Twitter.

What do you make of that? It's this is happening, but it's impossible to prove. I mean, it just conveniently forgets that every time somebody votes, there is a record associated with that vote. Right. That is what voter registration literally is. And so I would just urge people to go listen to what Republican election officials have consistently said, which is that voting by mail, yes, is marginally more vulnerable to fraud. But again, there has never been evidence that this is at a wide scale when it does happen, usually at the hyper local level.

it gets found out, right? I mean, think about a few years ago, North Carolina's ninth congressional district where there had to be a new election because of some vote by mail fraud. That's a situation where the system worked, right? And so in most election jurisdictions, there are members of both political parties watching basically every aspect of the elections process. If something like this was happening, we would know about it. And again, just, just a reminder that, uh,

in 2020, so many attempts were made to litigate this in court and every single time it didn't move forward because there was no hard evidence of the stuff that Trump was claiming. But still, even as Trump tries to win Pennsylvania, which everybody sees as almost certainly the most important state on the electoral map, he is posting things like this just the other day on Truth Social. This is from Trump. Pennsylvania is cheating and getting caught at large scale levels rarely seen before. Report cheating to authorities. Law enforcement must act now.

Any sense what rhetoric like this before the election is finished, before the results are in, any sense what he may do if he does lose Pennsylvania, if he does lose the presidential election? I think there's full expectation that if he loses Pennsylvania, that the idea will be that the vote was rigged. I mean, for four years,

there have been calls from election officials from both parties for Pennsylvania to change how they count votes. There are rules in place that make it just take a lot longer to count mail ballots than they do to count in-person votes because they can't start until Election Day. And Democrats have tried to change that law, but Republicans have largely blocked it. Republicans in the legislature have blocked it, right? And so we've been kind of for four years looking ahead at this election, knowing what was coming. And what we are going to see almost certainly is that

After the election, mail ballots, which are going to be largely Democratic votes at this point, are going to take longer to count than Republican votes. And so you can kind of see the writing on the wall of how Trump has messaged in situations like this before. And that leads to another big question that I have for you. And you might not actually know the answer. And I think that's important to say if that's the case, because...

On Tuesday night, you and I and millions and millions of people are going to be watching election results come in and trying to see who won what state. Now, four years ago and to a different extent in 2016 as well, the results were being posted in a little bit more of a wonky way than we were used to seeing because of the different ways people were voting and because of the ways that mail-in voting largely skewed Democrat, like you just said.

One of the big stories in the lead up to the election this year has been there's a lot more of an almost even partisan split in who is voting early.

Do we have any sense yet how that changes when results come in, when we can see the results, or are we still going to be expecting Pennsylvania and the other important states to be taking several days to count these ballots? I actually think it's an important distinction to note that when we're thinking about next week, the bigger distinction in terms of how long it takes to know who won a state is going to be less about how long it takes to count the votes and more how close that state is. And so when we're watching a state like Pennsylvania, which

might be a razor, razor thin margin. Then you start getting into the kind of the wonkiness of how mail ballots are counted there. Wisconsin is another state we're watching because they cannot even start processing absentee ballots until on election day. And so, yes, if the margins are very, very close in any of these states, we are going to be waiting for every single one of those votes to be counted until the AP and other news outlets can call a race. And it's worth saying here, as we're going to be saying a lot

Tuesday on, when votes are being posted on a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Friday, they were not votes that were cast on that Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. They were cast before the election. It's just taking long to count them. Exactly. And I would actually urge people to watch their own place if they live in a non-swing state. That's happening everywhere. You will see vote totals shift in the days after the election as they are counting provisional ballots, counting ballots that come in from overseas voters, things like that. It's just that these swing states have so much more scrutiny. Yeah.

Let's talk about one more thing here. We've been talking about the political rhetoric, but a lot of the stuff that really matters in terms of the election administration and vote counting is what happens in the courts. And we've already seen a lot of lawsuits in motion. What are they targeting and what are the goals?

So the RNC and the Trump campaign say that this is really just about maintaining safeguards for the election and making sure that, quote, only legal votes are counted. But we're seeing lawsuits about all sorts of things. In some states, targeting entire voter rolls, saying states aren't doing enough to

clean them in other places, you know, targeting very specific aspects of elections, like the way people turn in their mail ballots and whether specific mail ballots should be counted. I think that part of this is not abnormal. You always see kind of election fights in the courtroom leading up to and then after Election Day. What's interesting this cycle when you talk to election experts is

It seems like the Trump campaign and Republicans more broadly are kind of already setting the stage for things kind of giving breadcrumbs to issues that they might bring up to try to challenge the election results should Trump lose after the election. Let's step back. And we've talked a lot about this in different segments and off the air over the last few years because it's a big part of your world, Miles. Do we have a sense of how much all these falsehoods are resonating with voters?

It is very unclear, and that's going to be kind of the thing I'm watching most closely over the next couple weeks. We had an NPR-PBS Marist poll come out a couple weeks ago that found that the majority of Americans are concerned about voter fraud in this upcoming election, a very ominous message. At the same time, a Pew Research Center poll found recently that more than 70% of Americans are confident in how the elections are going to run. So we're kind of seeing conflicting messaging on this point in terms of confidence. I think one optimistic point that I've noticed recently

across most of the polling on this issue is that people are confident in their local election workers, which at a time when these people are kind of downtrodden, feeling kind of attacked, I think that is a point of optimism. That's NPR voting correspondent Myles Parks. Thanks so much. Thanks, Scott.

This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlem and edited by Adam Rainey and Benjamin Swayze. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. One more thing before you go, you can now enjoy the Consider This newsletter. We help you break down a major story of the day. You'll also get to know our producers and hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

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