Many voters from both parties say election fraud could cause midterm losses, poll says
A sizable percentage of American adults think election fraud could handicap their preferred party in the upcoming midterm elections.
10/10/2022 Clark County, WA Repost from the Miami Herald
Thirty-nine percent of Republicans and 25% of Democrats believe election fraud would likely be the reason their party does not win control of Congress in November, according to a Axios/Ipsos Two Americas Index. The poll, conducted in late September, surveyed 1,004 American adults online and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
Eleven percent of Democrats and nearly double the number of Republicans, 19%, believe it is highly likely that voter fraud would be responsible for their side’s losses.
On the flip side, 60% of Democrats say it’s unlikely their party’s supposed defeat could be explained by fraud, while just 36% of Republicans said fraud is unlikely to be responsible for a supposed GOP rout in November.
The poll, which is conducted monthly, also found that Americans who had shared at least a single meal in the past month with someone of a different political affiliation would be “more skeptical about jumping to conclusions that election fraud caused a loss,” according to Axios.
“There are so few of those [bipartisan] connections remaining, and that lack of connection contributes the space for people to believe the Big Lie and that elections are going to be stolen and all those kinds of things. Because they’re believing it about someone they’ve never met,” Chris Jackson, an Ipsos pollster and senior vice president, told Axios.
Confidence in the accuracy of American elections reached a low point in 2020, with only 59% of Americans saying they were “very” or “somewhat confident” that votes would be fairly counted, according to Gallup. Over the past 16 years, voter confidence has fluctuated between 59 and 76%.
According to a separate 2019 Gallup survey, Americans had less faith in their elections when compared to citizens in the vast majority of OECD countries, a group consisting of 38 countries working toward similar economic goals, including Hungary, Estonia and Slovakia.
The MIT election lab, which has measured confidence in elections over the past 20 years, found that all substantial changes in confidence correspond with changes in a party’s electoral performances, and its website states, “the overall average level of voter confidence has not changed very much across the past six elections.”
Confidence among Democrats was low during the 2000, 2004 and 2016 presidential elections, all of which were won by Republicans. Similarly, Republican voter confidence was low in 2012 and 2020, when Democratic nominees prevailed, according to the researchers. However, the largest partisan gap in confidence occurred during the 2020 election when President Donald Trump, in an unprecedented move, baselessly and continuously cast doubt on the results.
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