“Americans have become much less confident that we count votes accurately”

Gronke, Sances and Stewart for the Monkey Cage:

The bad news, however, is that the percentage of respondents who were very confident that the national vote (the hollow circles) was counted as cast dropped by 30 percentage points, from around 50 percent in 2000 to around 20 percent in 2012.

Partisan divisions grew during the decade, as they have in so many other areas of American political life.

Between 2000 and 2006, during the Bush presidency, Republicans were very confident in the nationwide vote count. After the 2008 election, GOP confidence declined steadily. Democrats, meanwhile, moved in the opposite direction: lower confidence (compared to Republicans) from 2000 to 2006, then an increase during the Obama years.

This seesaw pattern isn’t necessarily concerning, as long as partisans give at least grudging support to the proposition that the outcome was fairly decided.

But in research we conducted in 2012, we discovered that a substantial number of Republicans were reluctant to even acknowledge that Obama had won the election legitimately.

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