Trump is trying to restrict mail-in voting. Will it matter in the midterms?

0:00Angelita Soriano:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

0:20Rick Hasen:I think that the clock is just running out on doing anything effectively this time around. President Trump wants to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections. But even with the Supreme Court weighing in in his favor, he probably can't change much before November.

0:46Rick Hasen:It's Tuesday, August 25th, and this is Here and Now, Anytime from NPR and WBR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:56Rick Hasen:Today on the show, thousands of people in Indiana lost power for weeks after a derecho blew through the area. But some people say there's a bigger threat to the local power supply than severe weather data centers. We'll hear from one of them in a few minutes. Also, you're probably familiar with amber alerts for missing children, or silver alerts for missing people who are elderly or have mental health issues. But some states issue another kind of alert, specifically for missing people with intellectual disabilities.

1:28Angelita Soriano:She was missing for many days before her mother was able to find her. And unfortunately, we could not get a police department to issue a silver alert for her.

1:36Rick Hasen:Now the Department of Health and Human Services is launching a new national alert system for missing people with autism. More on that in about 15 minutes.

1:49Rick Hasen:But first, the Supreme Court is throwing a wrench into the fight over voting just a few months before the midterm elections. On Monday, the court said President Trump can go ahead with an executive order that would make it harder to vote by mail with an absentee ballot. The unsigned ruling did not determine the legality of the president's order, which faces other challenges in court, but it could still affect the midterms. For more on how, we called up Rick Hassan, who directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law. Here's what he told Scott Tong. Well, the part that is relevant to the Supreme Court's ruling yesterday has to do with a USPS rule that would require states to do certain things, including use certain kinds of ballot envelopes with intelligent markings on them, as well as provide a list of all of their eligible voters to the USPS.

2:46Rick Hasen:And if they don't do that, then the USPS is not going to deliver ballots. So that's a huge change because the USPS always has been delivering ballots. And this would inject the federal government into who can mail ballots in a way that they never have been before. Yeah, and we should note the US Postal Service is a financial supporter of NPR. Now, many Democratic state attorneys general are challenging this in a court document. They called it a voter verification and ballot interception program. What scenario are these critics worried about? Well, I mean, there are a few things here. One is there's a different part of the executive order that requires the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a rule and create a list of citizens that it would then share with the states.

3:36Rick Hasen:That would get submitted to the USPS, as would the states list. And there's another part of the executive order that says the DOJ, the Department of Justice, will prosecute those election officials who don't do enough to keep non-citizens off the rolls. So there is this implicit threat. It's not explicit, but it's an implicit threat But if you don't match your list with the DHS list, you could be facing criminal liability. So that's another thing that is kind of a threat hanging over the heads of state and local election officials who already are stressed enough trying to prepare things for November.

4:12Rick Hasen:Well, I guess that's the question, right? We're 10 weeks out from the midterms for state election officials clearly already planning to make this happen. What do they do at this point? All this is still being fought out in court. Right. So the ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday was not on the merits of whether the executive order is legal, whether the USPS could limit which mail ballots they could deliver. Instead, it was a technical ruling that said that the states had brought their case too early before the USPS had finalized their rule. Now, on Friday night, this past Friday, the USPS did announce their final rule, and it's now in effect, except there's another court order from the same judge in the district court that stops that from going into effect nationwide.

5:02Rick Hasen:So it's a huge mess. It's going to go back before that judge in Massachusetts. There's going to be a new order, and this could be back before the Supreme Court within a week or two. And in the meantime, ballots are going out by mid-September for overseas and military voters in some states even earlier than that. The Supreme Court has created this concept called the Purcell Principle. I believe you coined that term, Professor Rick, that you don't change election rules too close to an election. So how does that fit into all of what's going on here? Well, so that's a rule that typically applies to federal courts changing rules.

5:41Rick Hasen:For example, if a state has a voter ID law and at the last minute a federal court comes in and tries to change those rules, the court said, well, that could cause a kind of confusion for voters and difficulties for election administrators. This kind of last minute, if this executive order parts can go into effect, would do the same thing. But the Purcell idea is not directly implicated because it would be the executive branch, not a court doing it. But still, as Judge Hitanji Brown-Jackson said in her dissent, that this is just meant to cause chaos. And the Supreme Court is becoming a partner in that chaos, she said, because they're letting this thing still hang out there.

6:18Yeah.

6:19Rick Hasen:So, Rick, if I'm a mail-in voter, if I've kind of mailed in my ballot in the past and I'm watching all this, what should I be watching for? Well, watch your mail. Hopefully that ballot will arrive. And if not, many states have other means of voting. Early voting is popular in person as well. But I do think it's too late and we're likely to see the same rules that we've seen in the past be used for this midterm election. Oh, that is, as all this is being fought out in court, it's in the headlines. You're saying likely will not affect what happens to this, how this November goes. I think that the clock is just running out on doing anything effectively this time around.

7:01Rick Hasen:That's Rick Hassan, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law. Rick, thank you. Thank you.

7:14Rick Hasen:Coming up next, it's been two weeks since a derecho, a powerful windstorm across parts of the Midwest, brought flash flooding and widespread power outages. In northern Indiana, some people are still without power. After the break, Robin Young speaks with one woman who just got her power back.

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8:29Angelita Soriano:Nipsco, a utility company in northern Indiana, says they expect to have power restored to more cities by tonight, two weeks after a powerful storm knocked it out. In Gary, Indiana, some were concerned there may have been a delay in response to communities that were majority black. Indiana's governor is now calling for an investigation into the response across the region. But meanwhile, what has this been like? Angelita Sorniana lives in Hobart, Indiana. Angelita, you got your power, you got your kids back to school yesterday. But two kids, you're a stay-at-home mom, no power for 11 days? Yeah, I mean, I'm glad I finally have power back.

9:07Angelita Soriano:And I mean, those days were just, you know, very inconvenient. You know, my daughters were scared. The first couple days, it was even hard to communicate, you know, with our phones, because the communication poles were down. going to the gas station to get gas for a small generator that I have would take two to three hours. You know, it was just, it was just very difficult. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine you mentioned the cell phone towers were down, but where are you going to charge a phone, you know, even if you have one and you have no power? And that generator, I understand it was for the refrigerator because you don't want to throw away food, but did it work?

9:54Angelita Soriano:yeah it's so my generator it worked for the first uh couple days and and then i realized i needed to put oil in it and i spent like three four hours trying to troubleshoot it and i i did end up having to to throw away quite a bit of of food especially with my girls starting school you know you try to stock up your fridge and and and everything and it was very difficult watching my food spoil. I bet. Well, this outage is adding to concerns you already had about an Amazon data center that's partly approved right across the street from you, rely on power from the local utility. Now, you're a part of a lawsuit against the city's planning commission over this center.

10:41Angelita Soriano:What are your concerns there? Yes. So, I mean, that was one thing that out of this whole disaster I was partially grateful for is that this data center is not 100 % operational. It's a proposed 26-building campus and with almost 800 diesel backup generators. And there's supposed to be 5.5 million gallons of diesel tank capacity at this site. And yeah, we are, me and several other residents are part of a lawsuit. You know, we're challenging the zoning as we don't really believe this is something that belongs in the middle of town, right across the street from homes, from farms. There's, you know, waters of the U.S.

11:36Angelita Soriano:here, there's tons of wetlands. And we have also expressed our concerns with, can our grid handle something that large? It's supposed to be a 2.6 gigawatt use of power, which is equivalent to 2 million homes. Well, you know that the Northwest Indiana Forum, they bill themselves as a voice for business. They've said that Amazon will cover the cost of any energy infrastructure upgrades needed to serve the data center. That could strengthen the overall grid reliability for everybody, which could even help you. And then Amazon has also promised the site will bring 400 permanent full-time jobs with good pay.

12:17Angelita Soriano:So what do you say to that, that this actually might have strengthened the grid and bring jobs? Well, in terms of strengthening the grid, I would like to see an independent resiliency study. This major storm just proves that possibly NIPSCO, their response planning, emergency response planning, and our infrastructure is probably just not there yet to fully support the overall grid. And in terms of the 400 permanent jobs, as far as I know where most of these hyperscale data centers, they're not all on site jobs. Yeah. Meantime, you must be just feeling a little bit knocked about there in Hobart.

13:09Angelita Soriano:Yeah. I mean, you know, we've expressed our concerns about, you know, our grid of, you know, reliability. You know, I've been without power this year at least six or seven times. And it's not, you know, a power loss of a couple hours. It's a couple days. This was obviously the longest, but it just raises even more concerns is that if that data center was 100 % operational, all of those 800 generators would have kicked on that noise, the air quality, it would have been horrible. Just here in my subdivision, the few of us that had generators running, it was so loud. It's been, you know, days that we've had our power on, and I still feel like I hear the hum from the generators.

14:04It was just so concerning.

14:07Angelita Soriano:Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Angelita Soriano in Hobart, Indiana, one of thousands of residents who lost power, and she's also part of a group fighting a proposed Amazon data center right across the street from her. Lots of power issues for you, Angelita. Thank you so much for talking to us about it. Well, thank you so much for having me on. 800 generators turning on, trying to think what that would sound like. Well, a couple notes, we reached out to Amazon for comment we have not heard back. And also, Amazon is a financial supporter of NPR.

14:45Rick Hasen:We've got one more story for you on today's show about a new national alert system for missing people with autism. Robin has that story in just a minute.

15:02Angelita Soriano:Well, here's a disturbing statistic. Nearly half of autistic children are prone to wandering. It's called elopement or eloping. Of course, that would be so stressful for their families. But autistic children are also attracted to water. And according to the National Autism Association, autistic children are 160 times more likely to drown than their peers. Now, advocates have pushed for years for more policies and resources to curb this. Now the Department of Health and Human Services is launching a new National Autism Missing and Endangered Person Alert initiative to coordinate response efforts.

15:36Angelita Soriano:Eric Garcia is Washington Bureau Chief for the Independent. He was diagnosed with autism as a child. He also wrote the book, We're Not Broken, Changing the Autism Conversation. Eric, welcome back.

15:48Rick Hasen:Thank you for having me.

15:49Angelita Soriano:And from what you know, how would this National Missing Person Initiative work?

15:53Rick Hasen:Well, I think it's important to recognize that a lot of this is still under development. I've combed through a lot of the fact sheet, and it says that this is a new federal partnership. A lot of it is under development. The way that it would work is it would essentially partner with the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, and under the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And what it would do is essentially build on missing and endangered and personal alert responses, very similar to purple alerts in, I believe, five states, which are for people between 18 and 65 who go missing.

16:34Angelita Soriano:Oh, I want to pick up on that. We know that there are amber alerts for missing children. They can come on your TV. silver alerts, mostly for missing older adults or folks with mental health issues, you know, alerts that can come on social media or on your phone. Last year, we spoke with a Democratic state lawmaker in Connecticut. This is Eleni Carvos-DeGraw about what led them to implement another kind of alert. What you're talking about, it's specifically for missing people with intellectual disabilities. We had a mom who had a daughter who was 19 years old with intellectual and developmental disability.

17:10Angelita Soriano:And unfortunately, she had met a man online and she had gone off with him. And he basically took advantage of her. And when he left her, he left her in one of our state parks. So she was missing for many days before her mother was able to find her. And unfortunately, we could not get a police department to issue a silver alert for her. So as she's saying there, the silver alert, which is for people with maybe mental health issues or Alzheimer's, they couldn't use it for this 19-year-old. So Connecticut now has the purple alert, as you said, and other states do as well. Officers train specifically to respond to people.

17:47Angelita Soriano:How do you think that compares as it's working with the proposed national alert system?

17:54Rick Hasen:I think it's very difficult. I mean, I think that one thing to take into account is that I believe only five states have a program like this. So it's very difficult to say how they would coordinate with states that don't have a program. It's very difficult to guess how this would be implemented across the board. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, it says federal partners will develop guidance and best practices for states and local communities, and it will work with state, territorial, tribal, territorial, and local authorities to make best use of the protocols. But the fact of the matter is that there still are a lot of undetermined.

18:37Rick Hasen:And I think the other thing to take into account is, if I could be just a little blunt here, this is an administration that has slashed numerous services for autistic people, whether it be the Department of Education Statistics Department, or it has essentially slashed the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. It has moved the Office of Civil Rights largely to the Department of Justice. So there is to say nothing of the White House's comments about autism and vaccines. So it's hard to build that kind of trust.

19:13Angelita Soriano:Yeah, I want to underscore that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the one who made this big announcement about somehow developing something. And of course, he has claimed that vaccines create autism. Extensive scientific research proves that is not true. So there might be some skepticism there. There are some concerns about privacy. Right. And maybe, you know, a question of, and we only have less than a minute here, why don't they just extend the purple alerts?

19:40Rick Hasen:Yeah, I mean, well, there are grant programs that encourage these kinds of programs. But, again, it really is about collaboration with the states because law enforcement is largely done on the state and local level.