Voting is mind-boggling this primary season. That worries experts.

Democracy is messy, but usually not that messy.

Take New Hampshire, for example, where President Biden boycotted the primaries last Tuesday after the state jumped the Democratic Party's new schedule to maintain its first-in-the-nation status. Because it would have been embarrassing if Mr. Biden had lost there, a group of supporters told voters that while he may not have asked for their votes, he did not. not want it. Can you please write to his name? (They did, and he won.)

Next on the primary calendar is South Carolina, on February 3, but only if you're a Democrat. If you are a Republican there, you cannot vote until February 24, after party members in Nevada have had their say.

Oh, and about Nevada: If you support Nikki Haley, you can vote for her in the state's primaries on February 6, but your vote won't count toward the Republican nomination. That is tied to the state caucuses on Feb. 8, and Ms. Haley will not be part of that process. If you support former President Donald J. Trump, you can vote for him in the caucuses, but not in the primaries. The primaries, which are run by the state of Nevada, will be conducted by mail, while the caucuses will take place in person. That's because the Nevada Republican Party was opposed to conducting the primaries by mail, which is one of the reasons it scheduled the caucuses in the first place.

Understood?

As voters enter an election year in which many feel democracy itself is on the ballot, they are faced with a bewildering array of dates and procedures to choose their presidential candidates. Not to mention the long-standing problem of scheduling separate primaries for presidents and other offices in some states, as well as special elections, all of which result in some voters having as many as five election days.

“It's all very confusing for us, even as election people,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the executive director of the League of Women Voters, which runs the voter information website Vote411.org.

A large body of research shows that the swamp could reduce participation.

“Anything that disrupts voter habits will reduce turnout,” said Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “Changes in location, day and format all have a disruptive effect.”

And that disruption, says Alex Meadow, the senior director of partnerships at Vote.org, could be the hardest to navigate for “voters who are newer to the process,” reflecting the tendency of primaries to focus on the most engaged and most partisan parties strengthened. voters.

It also has the potential to stoke distrust in elections — and in Nevada it is already doing so.

The process there splintered when the Republican Party in Nevada decided to hold its own caucuses — on a different night, with an ID requirement but no mail-in or early voting, and a provision that ballots had to be counted by hand. The party will award delegates to the Republican National Convention based solely on caucus results, and candidates who put their names on the ballot will be excluded from the caucuses.

So voters will have Mr. Trump as an option in the primaries, but not in the primaries, and they will have Ms. Haley as an option in the primaries, but not in the primaries. No matter how much support Ms. Haley receives during the primaries, she will not be allocated any delegates to the convention, and Mr. Trump's supporters will receive primaries in the mail without his name on them.

It's a party for weeks answered questions on social media from voters confused by Trump's absence or, worse, wrongly believing it shows the election was rigged.

Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald accused election officials of failing to advertise the party's caucuses in the primaries. But there also seems to be misinformation at play.

Last week, Kash Patel, Mr Trump's former counterterrorism adviser, said: stopped a primary in Nevada in a video interview with right-wing commentator Benny Johnson, declaring, “They're rigging another election,” complaining that Mr. Trump's name was not on the ballot — ignoring that Mr. Trump himself was there had chosen not to put the name on the ballot paper. that there.

David Damore, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said he “didn't expect very much participation at all, which completely defeats the purpose of (a) having a party-building caucus and (b) an early state are.”

If confusion or misplaced anger keeps people from voting, the stakes will extend beyond the presidential candidates.

Research has shown that voting is “habit-forming,” meaning that once people start voting, they are more likely to continue doing so. The reverse is also true: people who miss an election risk losing the habit of voting. One confusing election can reverberate for years.

Political scientists have been warning about this for a long time. Researchers at Yale University and Tel Aviv University proposed twenty years ago that having many elections that are not considered important — which it called “typical of the United States” — can disrupt voting behavior as people become accustomed to skipping them. An investigation in 2016 showed that voting behavior remained strongest when elections followed the same format.

“If you voted in November 2020, you are more likely to vote in November 2024; You're not necessarily more likely to develop habits that would apply to some quirky Saturday election in primary season,” says Dr. Green, co-author of both studies.

These patterns are not absolute. Some changes, such as expanding early voting and voting by mail, have attracted people who could not traditionally vote in person or could not vote. And many voters are adapting, especially the committed voters who are most likely to participate in the primaries at all.

Enrijeta Shino, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama who studies voting behavior, said complications like those in this year's primaries would likely have a greater impact if they occurred in a general election. Additionally, more people than usual have been paying attention to politics, and voters turned out in large numbers in 2020, even during the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Voters are extremely engaged right now,” Mr. Meadow said, “and that may prevent these kinds of changes and shifts from having the impact they might have had in the past in a lower-intensity, lower-engagement environment.”

Still, this year's games have raised warning signs.

In New Hampshire, even as Republican primary turnout broke the state's record, turnout in New Hampshire's unsanctioned, Biden-less Democratic primary was lower than in the Republican primary four years ago, which, while similarly uncompetitive were, but were the leading candidate in the primaries. mood.

Both Mr. Meadow of Vote.org and Ms. Solomón of the League of Women Voters and Vote411.org said their websites had seen increased traffic this year. Ms Solomón said her organisation's site had received more than four times as many visitors in the first ten days of 2024 as in the first ten days of 2020 – most likely a sign of an electorate unusually on the hunt for clarity.

“People are coming proactively looking for information,” she said, but added: “The concern for us is that you will see the voter fatigue that could set in.”

Kellen Browning reporting contributed.