A shockingly high number of Americans are anticipating that the fall midterm elections will be rife with vote fraud, putting trust in our institution of free and fair elections at major risk.
According to a new survey from Issues & Insights, nearly a third of all Americans believe there will be fraud in November:
The May poll asked 1,320 Americans, “Generally speaking, how confident are you that votes will be cast and counted accurately in the November elections?”
Among those responding, 61% said they were either “very confident” (36%) or “somewhat confident” (25%).
On the other hand, 31% said they were “not confident, with 20% saying they were “not very confident” and 11% saying they were “not at all confident.”
“Put another way, nearly one out of three voters believe our coming mid-term elections will not be fair, a perhaps disappointing result in a country that has long prided itself on having clean, transparent and honest elections,” I&I noted in an assessment of the poll results.
Worse, “there is the usual sharp split between Republicans and Democrats, who based on polling results increasingly appear to live in two separate Americas,” I&I said, noting the divide:
Democrats overwhelmingly believe our elections are above-board and fair. By 86% to 9%, Dems felt their votes would be cast and counted accurately in the upcoming election.
A majority of Republicans felt the opposite: Just 43% felt their votes would be fairly counted, versus 52% who said they wouldn’t.
Most independents agreed with the Democrats, but the margin was much smaller: 53% to 39%.
Interestingly, many Democrats and their voters were convinced that former President Donald Trump stole the election from his challenger, Hillary Clinton. On that note, I&I said of the 2020 election: “Only 32% of Republicans said they felt the election was clean, while 65% said it wasn’t.”
The bottom line is that Americans are increasingly uncertain about our electoral processes, and that won’t bode well for the future of our republican form of democracy.
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