American Views About Election Fraud in 2024

TL;DR

This study surveys American registered voters' beliefs about election fraud in 2024, revealing partisan and conspiratorial thinking influences perceptions of fraud prevalence, with significant portions believing in common occurrence of various fraud types.

Contribution

It provides new empirical data on voter perceptions of election fraud and analyzes how partisanship and conspiratorial thinking influence these beliefs.

Findings

Partisanship strongly correlates with belief in election fraud.

Conspiratorial thinking increases likelihood of believing in election fraud.

Substantial proportions of voters believe election fraud types are common.

Abstract

What are the opinions of American registered voters about election fraud and types of election fraud as we head into the final stages of the 2024 Presidential election? In this paper we use data from an online national survey of 2,211 U.S. registered voters interviewed between June 26 - July 3, 2024. Respondents were asked how common they thought that ten different types of election fraud might be in the U.S. In our analysis, we show that substantial proportions of U.S. registered voters believe that these types of election fraud are common. Our multivariate analysis shows that partisanship correlates strongly with endorsement of types of election fraud, with Republicans consistently more likely to state that types of election fraud are common, even when we control for a wide variety of other factors. We also find that conspiratorial thinking is strongly correlated with belief in the occurrence of types of election fraud, even when we control for partisanship. Our results reported in this paper provide important data regarding how American registered voters perceive the prevalence of types of election fraud, just months before the 2024 Presidential election.