Amid new reports that post office mailboxes have been vandalized, mail-in ballot applications shredded, and the dead receiving ballots, this shouldn’t be a big surprise: less than 6-in-10 have confidence that votes will be “accurately counted” in next month’s election.
In fact, the latest Gallup survey said that confidence matched an all-time low, driven by high fears among GOP voters, which the survey blames on President Trump’s warning against mail-in voting.
“As would be expected given Trump’s view, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (44%) are expressing far less confidence than Democrats and Democratic leaners (74%) in the accuracy of the election,” said Gallup today.
“We received calls from several post offices that our blue boxes, located at the post offices, had been tampered with.”
While @realDonaldTrump has raised concerns about voting by mail, Dems have shrugged them off as conspiracy theories. https://t.co/w0BuPzSqK0
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 7, 2020
Overall, just 59% said they have confidence in the accuracy of the election, including voting and vote counting, a low only seen once before in the 2008 election.
Trump’s warnings have been bolstered recently when Virginia reported that several U.S. Postal Service mailboxes in the Richmond area were bust open and mail was stolen. And this week, a “huge trove” of mail-in ballot applications sent by the Trump campaign to voters was found shredded in truck trailers in Indiana, according to reports.
In the survey, people also expressed concerns about mail-in votes not arriving in time to be counted.
Gallup’s bottom line: “Sizable percentages of U.S. adults see major problems with voting in the coming elections, but these views vary: Republicans are more concerned about issues of voter fraud, and Democrats are more concerned about eligible voters being kept out of the voting process. The one uniting issue is late deliveries of ballots from the U.S. Postal Service, which is something the Postal Service itself has raised concerns about.”
