#primaries

If you live in Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon or Pennsylvania, please make sure to vote on May 19! No election or primary is too big or small, every vote matters!

Why did NPR make a voter registration guide at npr.org/vote? I wrote about it in today's Up First newsletter — and I'll explain it here too. Unless you’re an eligible voter in North Dakota, the path to casting a ballot begins with registering to vote. And that can be complicated. For this year’s midterm primary elections, I worked with some of my NPR colleagues (including Alyson Hurt, Ben Swasey, Brent Jones, Jane Gilvin, Preeti Aroon and Zazil Davis-Vazquez) to try to make it easier by revisiting a project NPR first did before the 2024 election — a registration guide for eligible voters in every U.S. state and territory. There are similar guides out there, but many of them don’t specify the exact dates of the deadlines for signing up in time for the 2026 primaries. To save you from scrolling through the webpages of election offices (some of which are smoother to navigate than others), our guide also compiles links for registering online, checking your status and changing your registration. The project may sound straightforward, but it took a team of us days to research and fact-check every deadline and other details of the registration process, which can be hard to pin down because of recent changes to state election laws or late-breaking court orders from lawsuits. Reporting for this guide reminded me that elections are a patchwork across the country. In some places, registering to vote can only be done in person and/or by mail. I know. There's a lot to keep track of right now with so much going on in the world. So if you’re an eligible voter who can use a guide to help you register, I’ll keep it simple: Start by going to npr.org/vote. And if you’ve already registered to vote, you may want to visit npr.org/vote, too, to check your status before your state or territory’s deadline. Eligible voters can sometimes be removed from lists, especially if they’ve moved, changed their name or haven’t voted in a while. Like this year’s primary season, our work on NPR’s voter registration guide has only just begun. We’re planning to update the guide with registration deadlines for this fall’s general election.

Maybe a hot take but I do think one of the major issues facing the US is low voter turnout in legislative primary elections. Primary voters as a group are not necessarily representative of a given party’s base let alone of the electorate as a whole. And since most legislative districts are uncompetitive there’s no need for a primary winner to moderate their views in order to win the general election. Unfortunately I don’t know of any way to seriously increase voter turnout for primaries