Will your vote be counted?

The midterms are here! By the end of this month, mail voting will have begun in every single U.S. state. But as someone who used to live in Florida, a state that famously hates counting votes, I always worry that if I vote by mail, my ballot won’t be sent or received in time to be counted.

For this week’s episode of “What’s Your Source?” Dave talked to Jacob Bogage, a Reuters White House correspondent and our former Washington Post colleague, about what voters can do to help ensure that officials count their mail-in ballots. In short: mail-in voting is safe, but if it’s getting close to Election Day, it’s safer to vote in person.

If you’ve seen mail-in voting making headlines the past few months, but you’re not sure where things stand now, here’s a quick refresher: Trump signed an executive order trying to seriously restrict mail-in voting. As courts moved to restrict that order, the United States Postal Service moved to implement it. The Supreme Court left in place a ruling that blocks part of that rule from going into effect. And although the restrictions aren’t taking effect for the midterm elections this year, the justices haven’t decided whether to allow these restrictions in future elections.

I promise this is the final shameless plug for “What’s Your Source?” in this email: Last week’s episode answered a viewer question on what’s going on with all the food recalls and how much it has to do with RFK Jr. This past summer, Taylor Farms recalled a bunch of lettuce amid a cyclospora outbreak, and tons of other recalls got lots of attention.

But is our food actually less safe now than it was in the past? All these food recalls might make it seem that way, but they’re also the result of advances in food surveillance, lab testing and traceability — all tools meant to ensure that our food is safe to eat. But those advances have also come with a pretty complex and expansive distribution system for our food that creates more opportunities for contamination.

So, surprisingly, lots of these recalls can be tied to reasons beyond the fact that the guy overseeing the FDA is anti-vax, drinks raw milk, eats road kill and swims in fecal matter. But it’s still worthwhile to ask whether our food safety systems are doing their job, and what their role should even be. For one thing, almost all recalls are initiated by companies rather than the government. And the Trump administration’s funding cuts to the FDA certainly don’t help. They’ve left us consumers having to shoulder more of the burden in ensuring whether their food is safe.

Election Day and the end of daylight saving time have a few things in common: They’re in the first week of November, and they may plunge us into unimaginable and unbearable darkness. To pretty closely paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, more daylight rules and earlier sunsets drool. But plenty of Americans disagree with Ben and me here: When the U.S. tried making daylight saving time permanent in the 1970s, lots of Americans weren’t happy and Congress reversed course.

Still, some lawmakers are trying again through the Sunshine Protection Act. Although the bill sounds like it was written by the Itsy Bitsy Spider lobby, it was actually sponsored by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) and co-sponsored by members of both parties. It would make daylight saving time permanent across the country but allow individual states to opt out.

The bill passed the House and has the president’s support. But its path through the Senate, much like my vision in pitch-black darkness at 5 p.m., is unclear. The president even publicly posted a senator’s private cell phone number and encouraged his followers to call and urge the bill’s passage. Another senator cited safety concerns surrounding children riding school buses in darkness at early hours.

That brings us to this week’s media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise! Historical context around debates like these and related news coverage can help us understand them better.

Trump is going around giving speeches at rallies ahead of the midterms. At one such event in Nebraska Monday, he might have called for attacks on U.S. cities, proposed bribing Americans for votes, and compared himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

There has been a range of interpretations of Trump’s comments on U.S. cities. Here’s what he said: “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” One fact-check argues that the full quote shows Trump meant that paying higher gas prices was worth it to protect U.S. cities: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let them take — let it — let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” But to me, and to many others, there really is only one way to read this, even in the context of the full quote and especially in the context of Trump’s very real attacks on cities run by his political enemies.

Trump also repeated his promise that every adult U.S. citizen would get $5,000 if Republicans hold on to the House and Senate in the midterms. But he’d need congressional approval for this, and many Republicans aren’t on board.

You know the thing we all remember Richard Nixon for — postal reform and establishing the USPS’ independence, which factors heavily into this week’s episode of “What’s Your Source?” Well, he also resigned amid the Watergate scandal’s revelations of how his re-election campaign engaged in sabotage, wiretapping and illegal contributions. Now, the federal government is asking: Were we too mean to Richard Nixon?

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Justice Department is reviewing whether prosecutors mistreated Richard Nixon. The guy at the center of this is former Nixon aide Geoff Shepard, whose 78-page slide deck on this topic would admittedly be fun at a PowerPoint night. But he was asked to present it by the Office of Professional Responsibility, a government watchdog established specifically after Watergate to prevent something like it from happening again.

Trump-world is eager to back up claims that Nixon was treated unfairly. To be clear, mainstream scholars maintain that he wasn’t treated unfairly. But Vice President JD Vance argued months ago that Nixon was mistreated, in an effort to convince people that Trump is similarly being mistreated.