Americans are confused and worried about elections. Will that impact turnout?

It's a confusing time to be a voter.

Take this summer's back and forth over President Trump's executive order to restrict mail voting, which bounced around the courts until it was ultimately halted by the Supreme Court last week.

In the end, no mail voting rules have actually changed.

But across the country this midterm year, local officials say they're hearing from voters confused by the process — and worried about potential federal interference in the election.

"'How is this going to work? How are you going to make sure my ballot is counted? How am I going to get my ballot?' — I'm hearing all of these things," said Carly Koppes, a local Republican voting official in Weld County, Colo.

When asked how this cycle compares to previous elections she's overseen, Koppes didn't hesitate.

"This is my 22nd year [running elections]," she said. "Absolutely, this is the most uncertain."

Fewer than 50% of voters say they expect the midterms to be "free and fair elections," according to polling this month by the University of California San Diego, although a new NPR/PBS News/Marist survey did find that three-fourths of voters trust their own state and local officials to run a fair election.

The polls also zoom in on two particular areas of concern.

Four in 10 voters say they expect federal immigration enforcement agents to be present at polling places in their area, according to the UC San Diego survey, despite federal law banning armed federal troops from election sites.

And after the Supreme Court ruling against Trump's mail ballot proposal, the NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found a 13 percentage point drop in voters who expect mail ballots to be delivered on time, over just the past two years.

A separate poll, commissioned by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, also found that 62% of respondents said they were worried "legal or political disputes over election rules could affect whether their own ballot is counted this year."

All of that has cast a cloud over this election year in ways that many voters can't even fully articulate, said Stephanie Thomas, Connecticut's Democratic secretary of state.

"Grandmothers approach me concerned, and I say, 'What are you concerned about?' And they say, 'I don't know. I just feel afraid that something might happen,'" Thomas told NPR, during an event this summer hosted by the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

In response, voting officials say they're trying to thread the needle of engaging with voters about their fears, while at the same time reassuring them that laws are in place that protect them, and that officials have game-planned for various scenarios.

"From time to time, it's appropriate to sound the alarm, but you don't want to be alarmist," Steve Simon, Minnesota's Democratic secretary of state, said at that same CEIR event. "That's the balance we're trying to strike."

Simon said his state's high-profile confrontations with federal immigration authorities this year are "still a fresh wound," so many voters there are worried what the federal government might be planning this fall too.

"I want to be honest about what could be coming," said Simon. "But I always add very quickly that I think some of these scenarios are unlikely and that if they were to come to pass, we feel good about the laws and the tools and the partnership and the resolve that we have in Minnesota to overcome those challenges."

What might be the effect on turnout?

Midterm election turnout already lags behind presidential election years. The obvious question now is whether that turnout gap will be intensified by all these voter concerns.

But Lauren Prather, a political science professor at UC San Diego, said it's actually not so simple.

"One of the unresolved relationships in political science right now is between confidence in elections and turnout," Prather said during a media briefing about UC San Diego's recent polling. "We don't have good evidence — in the U.S. or in other countries — about whether people that trust the elections less end up turning out less. It's sort of intuitive that that would be the case, but we don't have good systematic evidence on that."

Recent election cycles have been among the highest-turnout contests in American history, Prather noted, despite Trump driving the rise of election denialism and persistent doubts about election reliability.

"Despite the fact that there's a lot of distrust out there, both sides still see elections as winnable," Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist who researches the health of U.S. democracy, said during the same briefing.

It's even possible that turnout for this year's midterms could be higher than normal due to voters' worries. In some cases, threats to people's ability to cast a ballot can spur higher turnout, as different communities and political groups rally to mobilize in response.

"It's possible that on net the effect is zero or even positive," Nyhan said. "But that doesn't mean it's healthy for democracy for people to fear that they will be disenfranchised."

Because even if people push through their concerns to vote, Nyhan said, for a democracy to function, people also have to trust the results after elections are completed.

"The distrust … creates a kind of dry tinder for elites who want to challenge the election results and undermine their legitimacy," Nyhan said. "The fact that we're in this position means we're vulnerable."

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