Donald Trump’s warning that the 2016 election is likely to be “rigged” has rightfully alarmed many observers, both here and abroad. Although the GOP nominee has provided no evidence of potential fraud, our research suggests that many voters may be receptive to his far-fetched claim, which could erode faith in the electoral system. Disputes over election results aren’t new, of course. In the wake of the 2000 presidential contest, ballot irregularities and the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore — which ended a recount in Florida and effectively handed the election to George W. Bush — led some Democrats to question the legitimacy of the outcome. Following Bush’s reelection in 2004, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a 2006 article in Rolling Stone claiming that Bush’s campaign had stolen the election. The culprit for many Democrats was electronic voting machines that could be hacked to flip Democratic votes to the Republican column. Trailing in the polls to Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, John McCain warned in a debate that the advocacy organization ACORN was engaging in voter registration fraud and was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” When Obama defeated McCain and Mitt Romney in 2012, Republicans became more likely to express doubts about the legitimacy of those elections.
To some extent, these patterns are predictable. People whose preferred candidate loses are less likely to believe an election was fair than those who supported the winner, something we call “loser’s regret” or a “hurrah effect.” In an article published by two of us (Stewart and Sances), we showed how important the “hurrah effect” really is.
The figure below shows the trend in voter confidence from the end of 2000 to the end of 2012, using every public opinion poll we could find. The top line in each chart shows how confident respondents said they were in their own vote. The lower line shows how confident people were in the national vote. We present the results for all voters, as well as for Republicans and Democrats separately.
First the good news: Despite a small dip in confidence in 2006, the percentage of respondents expressing confidence that their own vote (the solid circles) was counted as cast hovered consistently around 75 percent for over a decade. The bad news, however, is that the percentage of respondents who were very confident that the national vote (the hollow circles) was counted as cast dropped by 30 percentage points, from around 50 percent in 2000 to around 20 percent in 2012.
Full article: Americans have become much less confident that we count votes accurately – The Washington Post.