A Growing Lack of Faith in Elections

As lawmakers, state elections officials and social media executives work to limit intervention in the 2020 elections by Russia and other foreign operatives, an unsettling truth is emerging.

Vladimir Putin may already be succeeding.

The troubling disclosures of Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign – "sweeping and systematic," special counsel Robert Mueller concluded in his report on the matter – have policymakers on guard for what intelligence officials say is a continuing campaign by Russia to influence American elections. But even if voting machines in all jurisdictions are secured against hacking and social media sites are scrubbed of fake stories posted by Russian bots, the damage may already have been done, experts warn, as Americans' faith in the credibility of the nation's elections falters.

"This is Vladimir Putin's game plan – sow distrust, discord, disillusionment and division," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, says about the Russian leader. "It's his playbook for all Western democracies – not just us, but Europe and around the world. We're open societies, we're vulnerable to disinformation, and he regards himself as superior because he controls the press," adds Blumenthal, one of the authors of bipartisan legislation meant to improve election security.

"There's a real danger to such distrust in the integrity of our election system that has lasting damage," he warns.

Allegations of uncounted – or wrongly counted – ballots, voter suppression and other grievances tend to emerge in every election. Most famously in recent history, the 2000 presidential race was effectively determined by the Supreme Court. But the events of the past few years – including frequent comments by President Donald Trump questioning the integrity of a race he won – have aggravated the distrust, pollsters and analysts say.

An NPR/Marist poll before last year's midterms found that nearly 2 in 4 voters do not believe elections are fair, and well over half said they did not think all votes would be counted in November 2018. That compared with a 2016 Gallup poll that found nearly two-thirds of Americans were confident in the vote count.

Marist polling over decades shows that public faith in many institutions has plummeted, says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. For example, Miringoff says, in 1990, 62 percent of Americans said the media provided fair and accurate coverage of campaigns, with 37 percent disagreeing. Now, the numbers are virtually flipped, with an April Marist poll showing that 63 percent of Americans don't trust the media for fair and accurate campaign reporting, with 37 percent saying they do trust the media. The diminished trust in institutions is worrisome, Miringoff says, since it is those very institutions that inform the public of possible election meddling and handle the consequences of a disputed election.

In North Carolina's 9th Congressional District, allegations of election fraud led the state Board of Elections to refuse to certify GOP candidate Mark Harris as the winner in 2018, although Harris led by 905 votes in the unofficial count on election night. A new election has been ordered; primaries are May 14.

But despite the official action, meant to show the state would not sanction a narrow win when there was evidence of fraud, North Carolinians are perhaps even more skeptical of the election system, says Michael Bitzer, a politics and history professor specializing in Southern politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina.

"I think the combination of Russian interference [nationally] and the recent election fraud in the 9th has probably taken a pretty good hit on voter confidence. And probably voters are thinking long and hard about whom they believe," Bitzer says. "And it's not just the political aspects. We're getting into the integrity of the system itself," with voters tending to believe whichever scenario is sympathetic to their respective parties, he says. "And that becomes even more worrisome."

While in earlier campaigns, the grousing was limited to a small number of activists and political players not attached to a campaign or party committee, the charges of fraud or fixing are coming from candidates and elected officials themselves. Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams has refused to formally concede the race to Gov. Brian Kemp, telling The New York Times Magazine that, while she acknowledges Kemp officially got more votes, "I have sufficient – and I think legally sufficient – doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election."

Sen. Kamala Harris of California, a Democratic contender for president, told an NAACP audience that both Abrams and Florida Democrat Andrew Gillum would be governors of their respective states now were it not for voter suppression. In Florida, there were reports that some Florida voters were turned away from the polls because of signature discrepancies on their ID cards.

Hillary Clinton – who won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but lost the Electoral College to Trump – recently warned 2020 candidates that "you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you." She cited remarks by FBI Director Christopher Wray that the Russians were continuing their election interference efforts "unabated."

But Trump, analysts say, has taken the discrediting of the elections system to an unprecedented level. He insists he didn't really lose the popular vote and that immigrants voting illegally put Clinton over the top.

"He's the only president to contest an election he won," Miringoff quips.

More recently, Trump has mentioned – jokingly, defenders say – that he might just serve 10 years instead of the maximum eight. He has suggested in tweets that he is owed two extra years because of the two years "stolen" from his presidency by the lengthy Mueller investigation. He declined, in the 2016 campaign, to commit to conceding the race if the election night numbers had Clinton ahead. And now, political figures as senior as the House speaker have wondered aloud if Trump would refuse to go quietly even if he is defeated in 2020.

In the 2018 midterms, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, told The New York Times, she thought it was critical the Democrats win "big" or Trump would contest the new majority.

"He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races; he would say you can't seat these people," she said. "We had to win. Imagine if we hadn't won – oh, don't even imagine. So, as we go forward, we have to have the same approach."

Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer who is now in prison, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that if Trump indeed loses in 2020, "there won't be a peaceful transition of power."

On Capitol Hill, there is an uneven appetite for legislation to thwart foreign meddling in the elections. Blumenthal is working with Sens. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, to pass legislation shoring up voting machine security and making it a federal crime to hack into them.

Sen. Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, says that aside from addressing the direct problems – balloting integrity and disinformation on social media – there needs to be a credible spokesperson to certify that the election was not rigged.

Russian operatives could conduct all sorts of shenanigans – such as posting videos of voters speaking another language, suggesting they are not citizens – and perhaps be cheered on by Trump himself, Reed warns.

"So you have, coincidentally or otherwise, a national discussion in which [people are] being misinformed by Russian cyber operatives and validated, in a sense, by the president," Reed says. "You have to have some objective, legitimate referee, if you will, to say, 'We've looked at all these reports, we've talked to the secretaries of state. And the election's valid.'"

Some Republicans want less federal involvement. It's states – not the federal government – that run their elections, and that should not change, says Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin. Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama and a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says awareness of possible threats and "fake news" on social media does a lot to address the problem.

"I think we're a lot more alert than we were two years ago," Shelby says. "Are we there yet? Will we make it foolproof? It will be hard." And making Americans trust the result may be harder still.