A visible minority (36%) say their confidence in the count will be diminished if a winner on election night cannot be determined because it takes longer than normal to count, a prospect that is becoming increasingly likely to be greater shares of the public turn by -submit votes to cast their vote.
Among all registered voters, 34% say they would prefer to vote by post in the presidential election, 22% say they would like to vote early in a polling station, and just 43% say they would prefer to vote in person on election day. That represents a 10-point increase over the share that voted by mail in 2016: 24%, according to the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission.
The political divide over how voters want to spend their ballots is broken. Among supporters of the president, 66% say they would rather vote in person on election day. Those voters who supported former Vice President Joe Biden most preferred to vote by post (53%).
If this separation continues through the election, it could result in election results that look wildly different from what Americans are used to seeing. Election officials first count one type of ballot, and then move on to another, which means that this year, early returns may not be representative of the full ballot box. Differences between absentee ballot and Election Day Vote have generally not been a uniformed partisan in the past.
For example, two years ago in Arizona, Republican Martha McSally was ahead on election night, but Democrat Kyrsten Sinema later took the lead. When that once happened, Trump decided “corruption” and tweeted, “call for a new election?” McSally later indicated.
The survey also finds that a majority of Americans are concerned that changes to the voting rules intended to make it safer to vote during the coronavirus pandemic will not go far enough (64% are at least doing something about) and that these changes will make it too easy for people to cast fraudulent votes (59% respectively). But concerns overlap only for a small portion of the audience: Just 36% express concerns about both.
One comprehensive study of voter fraud, which examined more than 1 billion votes between 2000 and 2012, found a microscopic level of fraud in U.S. elections, but determined that if fraud did occur, absentee ballot fraud was one of the hottest methods.
Trump’s treatment of electoral security was criticized
In recent weeks, Trump has, without proof, questioned the legitimacy of ballot papers by e-mail and falsely claimed that the country could never know the results of the election.
Overall, 51% of Americans say they approve of the way the president treats the security of elections in the United States, 40% approve of it. The interview was in the field when news broke about changes to the US Postal Service that may have motivated politics.
Experts say Trump’s remarks undermine public confidence in the election process and that he may set the stage to challenge the results if he loses.
Trump immediately declared that he might not join in if Biden dominated the count. He was reprimanded several times in a Fox News interview in July, refusing to oblige him to accept the outcome of the election. “I have to see,” Trump replied, “No, I will not just say yes. I will not say no, and I have no last time either.”
Trump’s own supporters say for the most part that the loser of the election has a responsibility to confess, as do most Biden supporters (83% among Trump supporters, 94% among Biden voters), and despite Trump his non-binding stance, most voters feel that their elected candidate will follow through with a concession (68% of Trump voters say he will, 83% of Biden supporters say the former VP will). However, Trump backers are much more confident that Biden will actually follow and convert (51%) than Biden supporters are that Trump will (16%).
Influenced by the coronavirus pandemic, states across the country, with election officials from both parties, have expanded mail-in-vote in several ways.
The extent of change varies by state. Some states, mostly with Democratic leadership, have switched to universal vote-by-post for November, where every registered voter automatically gets a vote in the mail and limited personal voting rights will be offered on election day. Other states send absentee ballots to all registered voters. Some have dropped demands that voters give an apology for getting an absent vote or have raised concerns about coronavirus as a valid excuse. Some have changed the deadlines that require votes to be received or postmarked. These changes came quickly, and experts have warned that voters may be confused by the new policy.
Among Trump voters, 87% fear it is too easy to cast fraudulent votes, compared to just 32% of Biden supporters. On the other hand, Biden voters are more concerned that it will be even more difficult for eligible voters to cast votes safely (81%) than Trump voters (47%).
Trump supporters give less confidence in the accuracy of voting and counting this fall, 50% say they are very or somewhat confident vs. 65% among those who support Biden. But the shift since 2016 is almost entirely on the Democratic side. Supporters of Hillary Clinton were for the most part confident that votes would be cast and counted accurately in 2016, 88% felt that way, while among Trump supporters 49% were confident.
The impact of an expanded count on confidence is more clearly negative among Trump voters: 53% say the certainty of the results on election night would not diminish their confidence in the vote, while a majority of Biden’s supporters say it does would not affect (49%). The rest of Biden’s voters are divided on whether it would give them more (27%) or less (23%) confidence in the accuracy of the result.
The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS August 12 to 15 during a random national sample of 1,108 adults reached on landlines or by telephone through a live interviewer, including 987 registered voters. Results for the whole sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. It is 4.0 points among registered voters.
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