SALT LAKE CITY — Ahead of the first presidential primary votes in Iowa, a majority of Americans are worried about disinformation and 41% say the country is not prepared to ensure November’s election will be safe and secure, according to a Marist College poll conducted in partnership with NPR and PBS News Hour. Democrats are more worried than Republicans.
The poll reflects a number of Americans’ concerns about the election process — from voter fraud to foreign interference. It comes in the midst of an impeachment trial and follows years of discussion about Russian attempts to spread misleading and divisive information to sway the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor.
“Ultimately, the biggest threat to democracy is apathy and not wanting to get involved. We won’t be able to tackle the issues that exist within our electoral system if we don’t have a healthy democracy with everyone participating in it.” — Desiree Barnes, spokesperson for Vote.org
Democrats and Republicans view these events differently and also have opposing views when it comes to election security. Sixty-six percent of Democrats say the country is not very prepared or not prepared at all to hold a secure election. In comparison, just 11% of Republicans say the same, according to the poll, which is based on a survey of 1,259 adults completed between Jan. 7 and Jan. 12.
“If you are a Republican you are more comfortable and have more confidence in the election process than Democrats,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. “That reflects the divisions in our society and the fact that people feel the other side really doesn’t have their backs anymore.”
While political science research shows people who are mistrustful of a system are less likely to participate, fears about election security probably won’t prevent Democrats from showing up at the polls in November, said Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies elections.
If anything, it may have the opposite effect, Stewart said. Some projections indicate the country may see a higher voter turnout rate in 2020 than it has in more than a century. Desiree Barnes, spokesperson for Vote.org, said there has been 10 times more activity on the organization’s website in recent weeks than in previous years.
“The distrustfulness is a part of the distrustfulness of the Trump administration,” said Stewart. “That appears to have been strongly mobilizing for Democrat voters and candidates in 2018 and all the evidence shows it will continue to be mobilizing in 2020.”
Partisan divide
While a high level of concern about the election process may not affect voter turnout in the upcoming election, it may have an impact in the long run if trust continues to erode, said Miringoff.
“The single biggest challenge of the moment is that it’s pretty much a guarantee that any high stakes federal election that is remotely close will not be seen as fair by many backers of the losing side.” — Rob Richie, president and CEO of FairVote
According to the poll, most Republicans say Trump has taken sufficient steps to make sure there will be no more election interference in the future.
”I can trust (Trump’s) word to know that he is going to try as best as he can,” poll participant Joel Martin, a Republican from California, told NPR in a follow-up interview.
But the majority of Democrats say Trump has not done much, or nothing at all, to prevent foreign meddling in elections. Eighty-eight percent of Democrats say he has actually encouraged it.
“Fairness of course is in the eyes of the beholder,” said Rob Richie, president and CEO of FairVote, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increased voter turnout and fair representation.
There is a strong winner-loser effect, Richie said. That means winners tend to believe the outcome of an election is an accurate reflection of the desires of the people, while losers are more likely to feel they have been cheated in some way.
“The single biggest challenge of the moment is that it’s pretty much a guarantee that any high stakes federal election that is remotely close will not be seen as fair by many backers of the losing side,” said Richie.
Threats of cyberattacks
Since 2016, there has been a surge in preparedness to combat potential cyberattacks that could interfere with election results, said Theodore Allen, a professor of integrated systems engineering at Ohio State University who studies election security.
In 50 states and more than 2,400 local jurisdictions, the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has helped to improve risk management practices with the implementation of multifactor authentication and intrusion detection systems, for example.
“We’ve made election security our top priority at CISA for the simple reason that American elections should be decided by American voters — without foreign interference,” a CISA official said in a statement for the Deseret News.
Still, in places without adequate cybersecurity protection, it is possible to hack voter registration lists and remove or alter names so that when people show up at a polling place, they find they are not able to vote. It is also possible to access and compromise voting machines while they are being transported, said Allen.
While there have been no confirmed cases of these things actually happening or votes being changed by hackers, government leaders are working to address vulnerabilities and prepare for worst-case scenarios, Allen said.
But lax cybersecurity isn’t the biggest threat to safe and accurate elections, according to poll participants. Thirty-five percent of respondents said misleading information was the biggest threat, followed by voter fraud, voter suppression, foreign interference and problems at the voting place like long lines.
Fifty-nine percent of Americans polled reported that it is hard to tell the difference between facts and misleading information.
“On the information side, we live in a world in which there are fewer authoritative gatekeepers of information,” said Stewart. “The general public has not caught up in sophistication in judging sources of information. I would say we should worry about the broader issue rather than just Russian manipulating.”
In addition to addressing election security, CISA is working with government and industry partners to educate the American public about “recognizing the risk of disinformation, questioning sources, investigating issues and thinking before linking to stories,” the official told the Deseret News.
Overall, the poll shows that when it comes to fears about the fairness and accuracy of the upcoming election, Americans are worried about many different things, Stewart said.
However, while these concerns are valid, they are not excuses for not voting, said Barnes.
“Ultimately, the biggest threat to democracy is apathy and not wanting to get involved,” Barnes said. “We won’t be able to tackle the issues that exist within our electoral system if we don’t have a healthy democracy with everyone participating in it.”