Most voters confident state election officials will accurately count ballots: Survey

Most voters say they have confidence in local and state election officials to accurately count ballots as Election Day draws near, a new survey reveals.

The poll, published Friday by The Associated Press-NORC Research Center, shows voters are placing more faith in their local jurisdictions — 58 percent for state and 62 percent for city/county — than they do in nationwide officials, which garnered 48 percent support, to ensure ballots are counted correctly.

At every level, Democrats are more confident than Republicans across the board that voting methods and results will accurately represent the ballots cast — including during early voting —the survey found.

The voting method with the highest trust overall was electronic voting with paper receipts, which 53 percent of registered voters said they felt extremely or very confident about. Paper ballots scanned into a machine, 48 percent, and paper ballots county be hand, 40 percent, followed after.

Main-in ballots returned by the U.S. Postal Service or those turned into a drop box each had less than 40 percent support — 36 percent and 37 percent, respectively, the data shows.

On the other side, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favor requiring photo IDs at voting venues, with 93 percent strongly or somewhat in favor compared to 58 percent of Democrats. However, Democrats are more likely to favor automatic voter registration with the retrieval of a driver’s license or same-day registration, pollsters noted.

Many of the voters in the poll also lacked confidence in the Supreme Court's ability to decide election cases fairly. Roughly 43 percent of registered voters said they are not very or not at all confident in the high court to handle the cases in a nonpartisan way.

This comes amid the administration's attempts to reassure the public that voting practices are secure. After claims of fraud exploded during the 2020 election, accusations skyrocketed. Recent research shows that cases of election fraud are few and far between, which is largely due to the decentralized nature of U.S. elections.

The AP-NORC survey was conducted Oct. 11-14 among 1,072 adults in the U.S. and has a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.

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