Fascinating post from Charles Stewart:

Donald Trump’s relentless messaging about a “rigged election” is having an effect on the confidence voters have that their votes will be counted accurately.  But, it’s not the effect you think.

I came to this conclusion as I was considering yesterday’s Morning Consult poll results about confidence in the vote count.  It so happens that I asked almost exactly the same question on a national poll during the pre-election period in 2012.  (I can’t take all the credit.  My colleague at Reed College, Paul Gronke, joined me in sponsoring a “double-wide” module on the 2012Cooperative Congressional Election Study.)  I decided to compare what Morning Consult found today with what we found almost exactly four years ago.

The results were surprising.  The percentage of respondents who say that they are “very confident” that their own votes will be counted accurately is virtually unchanged from 2012.  Confidence that votes nationwide will be counted accurately has, if anything, increased since 2012.  Trump’s rhetoric appears not to have reduced Republican confidence in the accuracy of the vote count over the past four years.  Rather, it has increased the confidence of Democrats.  The degree of party polarization over the quality of the vote count has increased since 2012, but it is Democratic shifts in opinion, not Republican, that are leading to this greater polarization.