David Graham in The Atlantic:

It’s too early to say who will win the 2020 presidential election, but there’s a good chance that one loser will be faith in the electoral system. President Donald Trump is alleging—as he did four years ago, though sooner in the cycle this time and with greater vehemence but no more evidence—that the voting system is subject to widespread fraud. Should he win, it will give him another four years to undermine the system from within and assail voting-rights protections. Should he lose, his defeat is likely to reinforce the spurious claims of fraud he is spreading now.

According to new research, unfounded claims of fraud from Trump and his allies significantly undermine faith in the American election system, especially among voters who support him. Worse, the damage seems to be resistant to repair by fact-checking.

“It may be that confidence in the election system is a soft target,” Brendan Nyhan, a political-science professor at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the new paper, told me. “It’s complicated, hard to observe, unintuitive, and relies on trust. Trust in institutions seems to be easier to destroy than to build.”