How confident Ohioans are about the integrity of the presidential election depends on who they are backing, with supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden feeling …
How confident Ohioans are about the integrity of the presidential election depends on who they are backing, with supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden feeling more assured than backers of President Donald Trump. That finding is one of the conclusions drawn from a statewide poll conducted as a joint project of the Your Voice Ohio media collaborative and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. The poll was conducted by the Center for Marketing and Opinion Research from June 24 to July 15. It has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, and involved a random sample of 1,037 registered voters. Nearly 75% of registered voters surveyed about their attitudes toward the 2020 general election say they are greatly or somewhat confident that their ballots will be counted fairly. According to the survey,34.7% of respondents said they had a great deal of confidence that their votes would be counted correctly, and 40.9% have some confidence. Just 24.3% responded they had little or no confidence. The level of confidence was fairly consistent based on whether respondents believe the country is on the right track or the wrong track. Those who said the country is on the right track represent about 40% of responses and those who believe it is on the wrong track represent about 60% of responses. The fact the overall confidence in the integrity of the election doesn’t correlate with Ohioans’ broader view of the state of the nation doesn’t surprise Dr. John Green, director emeritus of the Bliss Institute, although he allows that might not be the case in all states. “What we’ve seen in Ohio over the past few years is people’s confidence in the current voting system that we have is very high, and it doesn’t vary much with the state of the economy, right track/wrong track,” Green said. “It’s almost as if they have made up their minds that, one way or the other, the system works very well.” Variation came when viewed through the lens of the presidential election: The most loyal supporters of the Republican nominee, Trump, are among those most concerned that the election might be problematic. Of those who had a great deal of confidence that their votes would be counted fairly,41% were strong supporters of Democratic nominee Biden, while just 27.4% identified as strong supporters of Trump. Of those who said they had no confidence,38.8% were strong Trump supporters, compared with 20.9% who were strong Biden supporters. Green attributes that gap to a couple of factors. One is that Biden supporters as a group are better educated than Trump supporters. “Education has a big impact on the confidence that people have in public institutions,” he said. “Now, just parenthetically, that confidence may or may not be warranted. But it’s a pattern that we see in a lot of different attitudes.” The other factor is that the current debate over an all-mail ballot cuts differently, he explained.
