LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Voting has begun in the 2024 general election.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
States are starting to send out absentee ballots, and early in-person voting starts today in Virginia and Minnesota. This is the first presidential election since Donald Trump's efforts in 2020 to overturn his defeat. Part of that effort included demonizing election administrators and other acts, and now election officials are supposed to do their jobs in a presidential race again.
FADEL: NPR's Miles Parks covers voting, and he joins us now from the swing state of Michigan. Hey, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Leila.
FADEL: So you were at a media briefing with swing state voting officials. How are they feeling?
PARKS: Yeah. So the energy yesterday was really interesting. You know, I'm from Florida originally, and I could not help thinking that this meeting reminded me a lot of the feeling a day or two before a hurricane was set to make landfall when I was. You know, these officials, they've spent the last four years preparing, trying to improve their systems, educate voters, try to persuade the many skeptical people in their communities about their processes. But in some ways, the next couple weeks, as voting starts, are a little bit out of their control. They don't know exactly what's going to happen. And there's this nervous energy and a sense that some unknown variable could happen at kind of any time. Here's the executive director of North Carolina's board of elections, Karen Brinson Bell.
KAREN BRINSON BELL: Hopefully we're returning to a world of civility where we understand that, you know, there are winners and losers in every contest, be it a sporting event or an electoral contest, and that has to be accepted.
PARKS: You know, you can hear in her voice that is not really a sure thing right now. But I also heard from a lot of election officials that they feel battle tested at this point, that they feel prepared for the sort of conspiracy theories and schemes that they're expecting to see over the next couple weeks.
FADEL: Did you get a sense from voting officials which of these schemes, conspiracy theories they may be expecting in November?
PARKS: Yes. It is clear the No. 1 narrative for the election denial wing of the Republican Party around this time is going to be noncitizens voting in American elections. Studies and audits have repeatedly confirmed that this is not a thing. It isn't happening at anything but microscopic numbers, but the far right has really centered their messaging on this idea online. And Trump, former President Trump, is already talking about it. Officials say it is almost certainly going to be a key narrative if Trump loses the election.
But to voting officials, it doesn't make much sense. You know, there are processes in place that make it really difficult for noncitizens to vote. But they also don't think it's logical that a person would go through all the trouble of getting to the United States only to put themselves on a government list, a public record and put themselves at risk of deportation or arrest. One clerk in Georgia yesterday told me the only time he's ever found noncitizens on his voting rolls are because they've come into his office crying, begging to be taken off when they were added by mistake.
FADEL: Now, Miles, election officials, I mean, it's kind of a dangerous job these days. There's an increased threat environment, more than a dozen state election officials said they were sent suspicious packages this week. How are they feeling about their safety?
PARKS: Yeah, four of the six states represented at this meeting yesterday said their office was sent one of these packages. They didn't end up being dangerous so far. They ended up containing white powder that in some cases was found to be flour. But physical safety is a big theme, and also the mental toll that this environment is taking on these people. You know, workers are going to be more likely to make mistakes if they're looking over their shoulder constantly, and then those sort of human mistakes are what further this cycle of misinformation. Gabriel Sterling, who's another election official in Georgia, made a plea to the audience during the town hall portion of this meeting yesterday to just remember that these are all humans in your neighborhood who are running this elections process.
FADEL: NPR's Miles Parks. Thank you, Miles.
PARKS: Thank you.
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INSKEEP: Social media influencers keep trying to find evidence of an imaginary story about Haitians eating pets.
FADEL: Now, let's recall some of the basics. People online repeated a story that's not true for months about migrants in Springfield, Ohio. The origin is obscure, though some of the people who repeated the rumors later apologized for spreading this false and dehumanizing information. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance picked up the tale that plays on stereotypes of immigrants. And then former President Trump stated it as fact in a televised presidential debate.
INSKEEP: So supporters have been trying to find something on the streets of Springfield. NPR's Huo Jingnan also spent time reporting there and has come back and is in our Studio 31 here. Good morning. Thanks for coming by. So who were these - who are these online personalities?
HUO JINGNAN, BYLINE: Well, some of these influencers might not be household names to you and I but they have millions of followers. Some are part of big organizations, like the pro-Trump conservative group Turning Point USA.
INSKEEP: Oh, yeah.
HUO: And others seem pretty much on their own, like this guy, Tyler Oliveira, whose video about Springfield got 4 million views in a week.
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TYLER OLIVEIRA: I pulled up to Springfield myself to see if this was real or overblown fake news.
HUO: What they all share, though, is a skepticism of mainstream journalism and what the city has said about the story. And moments like this are a big opportunity for them to build a following and get lots of clicks and views that they can monetize.
INSKEEP: OK, big mystery, citizen journalists, lots of suspense, lots of people on the ground. Have they found anything?
HUO: No. There were a lot of suggestive headlines, but I went through a bunch of these videos with my colleagues Jude Joffe-Block and Audrey Nguyen, and oddly, we didn't see anybody who has any concrete evidence. And to that end, here's one example of note. Christopher Rufo is a prominent conservative activist, and he put out a $5,000 bounty online asking for evidence that Haitian immigrants are eating cats in Springfield. What he was able to come up with several days later is this grainy, year-old video not from Springfield but from Dayton, which is 30 miles away, purporting to show cats being grilled. But when you look at the video, it's actually kind of hard to see what was going on.
INSKEEP: Yeah, I've seen it. When you went to Springfield, what did you find?
HUO: Well, we kind of tried to do what the influencers did. Like, we drove around, we talked to some of these people, and again, we found no evidence to back up these claims. We reached out to some of these people that we saw in these videos who either say they have witnessed something or, like, may know somebody who might have witnessed something. But at the end of the day, they would not speak to us on the record. And on the other hand, the Haitians there were very nervous. They're really fearful.
But one person did speak up. Viles Dorsainvil is a community leader, and he says that he and a fellow Haitian were misrepresented in the video by Tyler Oliveira, that YouTuber. Dorsainvil's image was presented alongside car crashes he said he has nothing to do with. And his fellow Haitian's image was edited to show that he had a cat in his hand. We reached out to Oliveira for comment, and he has not responded to our request.
INSKEEP: OK. You mentioned car crashes. That's another of the fake stories about immigrants and car crashes. What has life been like for the Haitians in this community where there are a lot of Haitians?
HUO: The community has been dealing with bomb threats and extremists marching through the streets following Trump and his running mate JD Vance, like, making these claims. The intense media coverage adds to the anxiety. In a popular Haitian restaurant, I talked to Junior Bellevue (ph), who moved from Haiti to Springfield recently. Bellevue says he feels safe himself for now, but his family doesn't.
JUNIOR BELLEVUE: My mom, she won't leave, and my sister as well, because they are afraid.
HUO: Residents that we talked to across the board want this national attention to move on. But for now, you know, Trump said he wants to visit the city soon.
INSKEEP: NPR's Huo Jingnan, thanks so much.
HUO: Thanks so much.
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INSKEEP: There's a problem with treatments for sickle cell disease.
FADEL: An announcement of genetic treatments generated excitement a year ago, but so far not very many people have signed up.
INSKEEP: NPR health correspondent Rob Stein has been asking why. Rob, Good morning.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: First, how bad is this disease?
STEIN: You know, Steve, it's just an awful disease. Sickle cell patients are born with a genetic mutation that causes deformed red blood cells. And those deformed red blood cells just kind of wreak havoc in the body. They damage vital organs, and they cause these episodes known as pain crises. I talked about this with Olaide Adekanbi. She's a 29-year-old sickle cell patient who lives in Boston.
OLAIDE ADEKANBI: It gets to the point sometimes where you're like, I cannot continue living this way. You feel like you're losing your mind, because sometimes, I just can't move. I just lay in one spot and try to distract myself from the pain.
STEIN: But these new treatments, they can help patients like her by giving them genetically modified cells that compensate for the sickle cell mutation.
INSKEEP: Well, Rob, you would think if it's that bad an experience that people would jump at the chance to address it somehow.
STEIN: Yeah. And, you know, there is a lot of excitement about this among patients and doctors and advocates. But so far, only about 60 of the tens of thousands of patients who are eligible for these treatments have started so far. And there are a bunch of reasons. One is that patients need to get a course of chemotherapy, and that chemotherapy can leave them infertile. And that's one reason why Adekanbi is on the fence.
ADEKANBI: I know I would like to have children in the not too near, but in the future. And so I'm really nervous about how that will affect fertility.
STEIN: But that's not all. Patients also have to go through lots of tests and procedures. And they might have to spend weeks, maybe even months, in a hospital that may not be near where they live, then years of follow-up. And these treatments, they're really expensive - $2 million to $3 million per patient. And some patients are also worried about, you know, what's going to happen in the long term? Will it keep working? Will it be safe?
INSKEEP: I'm glad that you brought me the voice of that patient because I feel that I can hear the anxiety in her voice and the difficulty of this decision.
STEIN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: So what does the future hold for people like her?
STEIN: Yeah, it's a really tough decision that patients are agonizing over. And, you know, it's not surprising that it's going slowly so far because these treatments are so complicated. But the companies that make them say that interest is accelerating. Dozens of hospitals are online now, and more are coming. More insurance companies are paying for it. I talked to another patient, DeShawn Chow. He's 19, lives in Irvine, Calif. And he's on track to get his genetically modified cells at the City of Hope Children's Cancer Center in Los Angeles by the end of the year.
DESHAWN CHOW: The first time I heard about it, I was kind of uncertain about it, but I'm hoping that it will change my life.
STEIN: So the hope is, with time, more and more patients will benefit from these new, cutting-edge treatments for sickle cell disease.
INSKEEP: NPR health correspondent Rob Stein brings us fascinating stories about genetics. Rob, thanks so much.
STEIN: Oh, sure thing, Steve. Great to be here. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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