Donald Trump has prominently promoted the idea that there are widespread conspiracies to commit voter fraud, and has recently called for a major investigation. That’s despite the fact that peer-reviewed studies have convincingly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare and difficult to prove (here, here, here and here). So who is likely to believe him? The answer: Americans who are hostile toward nonwhite immigrants. That hostility strongly influences estimates of how frequently voter fraud occurs. In a national survey of 1,000 adult Americans through the 2015 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we asked people to estimate how often voter fraud occurs. Like other researchers, we define voter fraud perceptions as how much people think that U.S. elections include noncitizen voting, voting more than once, and voting while pretending to be someone else.
The survey was conducted several months after Trump began his presidential campaign and after he began making voter fraud allegations. We also measured respondents’ resentment of immigrants. In this study, we followed the lead of other researchers who have measured immigrant resentment as believing that immigrants increase crime, reduce the use of English, dampen U.S. citizens’ political influence, and do not deserve any more special treatment or favors from government.
A large proportion of American voters who hold anti-immigrant attitudes also believe that voter fraud occurs frequently in U.S. elections. Similar to what we find in our 2014 study, resenting immigrants is the strongest predictor of believing in rampant voter fraud, even after controlling for conventional political dispositions and socioeconomic characteristics.
Full Article: Who believes in voter fraud? Americans who are hostile to immigrants – The Washington Post.