SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Election day is a month away, and early voting is already happening. More than a million votes have already been cast, with more coming every day. Miles Parks is our voting correspondent. He covers the topic 365 days a year every year, but right now is the moment when all of the storylines he's following rise to the top of everyone else's minds as well. That is especially true given how much the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results hangs over everything in this contest. So given all of that, we brought Miles on to talk to us about what he is focusing on. Hey, Miles.

MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.

DETROW: Let's start with the lawsuits because many are already being filed. What do we need to know?

PARKS: Yeah, so there's kind of two major buckets that I think voters can kind of monitor the lawsuits over the next couple of weeks. One is about how people are actually going to be casting ballots. The two big kind of things we're watching that still have yet to be determined - one is in Pennsylvania - big battleground state, as you know - where there's a big legal battle brewing over when people turn in a mail ballot and there's some sort of mistake on it, whether that's they didn't put in the right envelope or put the wrong date on it - whether those ballots should count. Republicans argue they should not. Democrats argue they should.

In Georgia, we're monitoring lawsuits related to the administration, the actual counting of ballots. Listeners are probably familiar - the Georgia Elections Board has passed a number of new rules in recent weeks, and there's a bunch of litigation deciding whether those new rules should stand.

DETROW: OK, so that's bucket one, the process of voting itself. What about the second?

PARKS: The second is we've seen a bunch of lawsuits - this happened in 2020 as well. The Republicans have been filing a number of lawsuits that legal experts basically say have no shot at succeeding but just serve to kind of inject doubts about the process. These are - generally been lawsuits focusing on the idea of noncitizens voting in American elections. This is not an issue that there is evidence has ever happened in anything but microscopic numbers. But in a number of states, we've seen lawsuits from Republicans alleging that it is happening or could happen.

DETROW: Let's talk more about that because this is something you've reported on a lot, this narrative of noncitizens casting ballots.

PARKS: There's been a pivot from - whether it's Donald Trump, Elon Musk - a number of prominent figures on the far right to start talking over the last few months about noncitizens voting in this election, and it seems to be working. We had a poll out from NPR/PBS News/Marist College out this week that found that 9 in 10 Republicans are concerned that noncitizens will vote in this elections process, which you can kind of see down the road how this could make it an effective narrative, should Trump lose, that he could focus on to try to overturn this election.

DETROW: Let's talk about another impact over the ongoing rhetoric around the 2020 election, the ongoing claims that Trump won the election, which, again, he did not. He lost the election. But we have seen this real uptick in harassment and threats to local election officials. These are people you spent a lot of time talking to. What are you hearing from them in terms of the threats coming in and how they're preparing for a really tense few weeks?

PARKS: There's a lot of nervousness and - when I talked to election officials this last couple weeks. I think the reason is going back to this poll I mentioned a second ago. The poll found that a majority of Americans right now are concerned that voter fraud is going to occur in this 2024 election, even though there's never been evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in American elections, especially recently. And so the fact that election officials have spent the last four years trying to educate voters on all of the myriad security processes they have in place that make it so fraught - it's so rare and especially hard to pull off at, like, a statewide or...

DETROW: Yeah.

PARKS: ...A federal race, right? They've been trying to educate voters, and it's just not really clear it's made a dent because Donald Trump and other Republicans have continued hammering this issue. Though, I will say, election officials are optimistic that they're in a better position to respond to some of those doubts this time around. Specifically, they're working closer than they ever have before with law enforcement, whether that's around polling places or certifications, thinking about after the election. And so I think election officials are a little bit dejected at the tone and tenor in which some voters are thinking about the election this time around, but they're feeling definitely better prepared for it.

DETROW: Yeah. What are you anticipating when it comes to how people cast their votes? Are you anticipating less early voting, mail-in voting than 2020 or what?

PARKS: Based on the conversations I've had both with experts and some poll results that we've seen, it seems like the trend towards early voting is continuing. If you actually zoom out and look at, like - think about in, like, 2000 or 2004. Almost all voters, more than 80% of voters, cast their ballot in person on Election Day.

DETROW: Right.

PARKS: Right? - whereas now there is the expectation that the majority of voters will vote early in this election, whether that's early in person or by mail. It is not a kind of height-of-the-pandemic moment.

DETROW: Yeah.

PARKS: So we are definitely going to see less mail voting than we saw in 2020, but I think the majority of votes in this election cycle, probably in the 55- to 60% range, are going to be cast early this time.

DETROW: Miles Parks, thanks for coming in.

PARKS: Thanks for having me, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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