Voter Confidence Declines, Survey Says

November 6, 2006

On the eve of the midterm elections, a survey commissioned by the USC Annenberg Center for Communication suggests a significant decline in voter confidence that their vote will be counted accurately.

The poll also shows sharp differences in voter confidence along racial and party lines.

The survey — led by Michael Alvarez, USC Annenberg Center Senior Fellow and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project — Michael found that there has been a significant decline in confidence among voters that their vote in the 2004 election was counted accurately, strongly suggesting a concern that their vote in this year's election may be mishandled. African Americans are currently less confident than whites on this issue.

As more precincts move to electronic voting, the study also found:

• The public thinks that electronic voting machines are prone to unintentional failures and agreed that they increase the potential for fraud.

• Roughly one-third of respondents did not have an opinion about the potential benefits or liabilities of electronic voting systems.

• The public views electronic voting as making voting easier for people with disabilities.

Interviews were conducted from Oct. 26-31 among a nationally representative sample of 1,084 adults, aged 18 and older, including 156 Non-Hispanic African Americans.

The question posed to likely voters was “How confident are you that your ballot in the November of 2004 presidential contest between George Bush and John Kerry was counted as you intended?”

In the survey, 75.1 percent of likely voters said they were confident their vote was counted correctly in 2004, 21.9 percent said they were not confident, the remainder didn't know. This is compared to results from a similar question on voter confidence posed to likely voters in March 2005. In that survey, 88 percent were confident, and 11 percent were not.

The comparison represents an almost 13 percent decline in voter confidence and nearly doubles the percentage of respondents expressing no confidence that their vote would be counted correctly.

Racial patterns also show an interesting trend: Only 18 percent of white registered voters stated a net lack of confidence in the recent survey, while 44 percent of African American registered voters stated the same.

The data indicates that the declines in confidence from March 2005 to October 2006 for white and African American voters are comparable in magnitude (white confidence has fallen by 13 points, African American confidence by nine points).

There is also a “partisan-confidence gap” among Democrats, Republicans and Independents regarding whether their votes were counted accurately in 2004.

In the recent survey, 90 percent of self-identified Republican-registered voters expressed confidence compared to 65 percent of self-identified Democrats and 75 percent of self-identified Independents. In the March 2005 survey, virtually all self-identified Republicans (97 percent) were confident, but only 86 percent of self-identified Democrats and 87 percent of self-identified Independents were. This shows a decline in confidence among all party voters, but most dramatically among Democrats and Independents.

Alvarez, a political scientist who conducted the study with Thad E. Hall of the University of Utah and Morgan Llewellyn of the California Institute of Technology, sees that a large majority of voters are confident that their votes will be counted accurately. However, there remains a sizable and growing segment of the population that may have concerns regarding whether their votes will be counted accurately.