Multiple Meanings? An Exploration of the Content of Attitudes About Voter Fraud

• In Event: Biased Perceptions and their Influence on Opinion

Abstract

Public and scholarly concern about voter fraud has grown dramatically in the recent years. Political elites in both political parties consistently raise questions about the integrity of the American electoral system and point to voter fraud as an explanation for these worries. Numerous public opinion polls suggest that the public holds many of these same concerns. In no small part because of these growing concerns, scholars of political science and law are increasingly likely to study the contours of public opinion about voter fraud. In particular, a great deal of research focuses on public perceptions of the frequency of fraud activities and the individual-level attitudes and identities and correlate with these views.

This project extends recent work on how people define and conceptualize voter fraud as a political issue. In doing so, we focus on a central question that to date work on voter fraud perceptions has not addressed: How do Americans define the issue of voter fraud? For example, what types of actions do they believe constitute fraud? Who do they believe engages in voter fraud? To answer this question, we rely on responses to original open-ended survey responses aimed at eliciting relatively unstructured attitudes and beliefs about voter fraud. These data were collected from multiple surveys, including a convenience sample fielded on MTurk in May 2018 and on multiple 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study modules.

The results from this research show that Americans define voter fraud in a variety of ways. Some think of fraud along the lines existing scholarship: voting multiple times or voting without being registered. However, we also find that many people think of fraud as voter suppression and institutional maleficence, like problems with tabulating votes. Further, American also believe that a variety of different groups of people and political organizations engage in voter fraud activities. As we provide one of the first critical analyses of voter fraud perception measures, we show how the content of these beliefs might differ across party and attitudes about immigrants. We also offer suggestions on how to strengthen survey measures and identify potentially under-explored dimensions of beliefs about voter fraud.

Authors

• Geoffrey Sheagley, University of Georgia

• Adriano Udani, University of Missouri, St. Louis