Voters feel a lot more confident about the handling of this year’s presidential election, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. It’s funny what four years and a commitment to election integrity can have on the psyche of the American voter.
“Most voters say that the 2024 elections were run and administered well, both in their local communities and across the country,” the voters’ evaluations of the 2024 election process states.
According to Pew’s survey, 95 percent of those reporting to have voted this year say that elections in their communities “were run and administered at least somewhat well, including 69% who say they were run very well.” That compares to just 59 percent of voters who said the 2020 elections were run and administered at least somewhat well.
The survey found 88 percent of voters questioned believe the elections across the United States were run and administered well in 2024.
Pew’s assessment found 93 percent of those who voted for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump had positive reviews of November’s election, while 84 percent of voters who cast ballots for the Democrat candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, expressed confidence in the elections.
More than 9,600 randomly selected U.S, adults took part in the survey, conducted from Nov. 12 to Nov. 17, a week or more after the Nov. 5 presidential election, according to the center. The voters are part of Pew’s American Trends Panel, a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly.
‘So Many Players Watching Now’
In 2020, when leftist groups and election officials used the cover of Covid to stretch election laws to breaking, not surprisingly only 21 percent of Pew respondents who said they voted for Trump believed the elections were run and administered well. Backers of Democrat Joe Biden, conversely, overwhelmingly (94%) expressed confidence in the operation of the 2020 elections around the country.
Much has happened since the rigged election of ’20, including election integrity reforms in critical swing states and the drive to get private money out of election administration like the hundreds of millions of Zuckbucks poured into local election offices.
But something else as important happened, grassroots election watchdogs say: Republicans woke up.
“Let’s say you are the owner of a warehouse and someone keeps breaking in all the time. Then you buy a pit bull guard dog and you let people know the guard dog is watching. People aren’t going to keep breaking into your business,” Chuck Muth, president of the Citizen Outreach Foundation, recently told The Federalist in an interview. “The elevation of the 2020 issues has had so many players watching now.”
Muth’s nonprofit late last year launched the Pigpen Project, an effort to clean up Nevada’s dirty voter rolls by tracking ineligible registrants in the battleground state’s voter registration database. The group has shone a bright light on a core election integrity weakness in a universal vote-by-mail state.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has done the same, stepping up its efforts over the past four years to remove ineligible registrants from voter rolls in Nevada, Arizona, and elsewhere. That includes the thousands of noncitizens that have shown up on registration lists.
“When a foreigner accidentally registers to vote in the Motor Voter system – as happened in the thousands in Pennsylvania – both Democrats and Republicans should be concerned,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in testimony earlier this year at the House Administration Committee’s hearing on preventing alien voting and other foreign election interference. “Once upon a time, fixing foreigners voting would have been an issue with not only bipartisan agreement, but bipartisan solutions.”
Voter ID Instills Confidence
Election law expert Hans von Spakovsky said he’s not surprised that confidence in elections has climbed. He noted the myriad election reforms signed into law over the past four years.
“North Carolina has been fighting for more than a decade to get voter ID in place. They kept getting stopped by the courts. But they got a law in place in this election,” von Spakovsky, manager of the the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and former member of the Federal Election Commission, told The Federalist in an interview. “Election reforms like these increase people’s confidence in the election process.”
North Carolina is one of 36 states that require some form of identification to vote, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Another Pew Research Center poll conducted earlier this year showed 81 percent of respondents support voter ID laws. Gallup in 2022 found 79 percent backing of photo identification at the polls. It’s a popular, vital and effective election integrity check, but that hasn’t stopped liberal voting activists from insisting — falsely — that voter ID suppresses voter turnout, particularly among minority voters.
As Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said at a 2021 hearing of the House Administration Election Subcommittee, the 2020 election saw voter turnout increase in every state, “including some of the sharpest increases occurring in states that require an ID to vote.”
“And further dispelling this myth that voter ID laws deter voting, voter turnout increased among all race groups in 2020,” said Steil, who at the time was ranking member of the subcommittee. He now chairs the House Committee on Administration.
‘Republicans Are Now Working Together’
Eyes — lots of eyes — help ensure integrity in elections. To that end, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced what it described as “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.” The initiative aimed to recruit more than 100,000 poll workers, watchers and election integrity team attorneys.
“Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day,” Trump said in a press release in April. “Republicans are now working together to protect the vote to ensure a big win in November.”
In Wisconsin alone, Republicans filled more than 4,500 election observer shifts, with another 2,000 shifts covered by Republican Party of Wisconsin (RPW)/RNC trainees, the RPW announced a day before the general election.
“Our Election Integrity Operation will guarantee this election is safe and accessible for all while preserving public trust in our elections,” Wisconsin GOP chairman Brian Schimming said in a statement at the time.
Republican election observers, in fact, spotted a serious security breach in the tabulators at Milwaukee’s central count site on Election Day. As The Federalist reported, the seals on 13 vote tabulation machines had been broken.
Trump won swing state Wisconsin, part of the Democrats’ vaunted “blue wall,” by some 29,000 votes after losing the Badger State by less than 21,000 in 2020. He won all seven of the critical battleground states on his way to electoral victory.
The RNC’s election integrity initiative included a “proactive litigation effort.” RNC officials said the GOP’s election integrity team members were engaged in 150 lawsuits this election cycle and scored some significant victories. In swing state Michigan, the RNC forced far-left Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to amend her guidance involving signature verification standards — directing clerks to “verify that the signature on a returned absent voter ballot envelope matches the voter’s signature on file.”
In battleground North Carolina, the RNC succeeded in stopping the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill from using an illegal mobile student ID to vote. A state appellate court overturned an earlier North Carolina State Board of Elections decision approving the Mobile UNC One Cards in violation of election law. As the Carolina Public Press reported in late September, the court sided with the state GOP and the RNC in finding that a digital ID is equivalent to an “image of a photo ID, either as a photocopy or a photo on a mobile device,” prohibited under a 2023 elections board memo.
The Power of Watching
The fact that there were “no major fights of any kind in any of the states” following the election, with Trump decisively winning the Electoral College count, helped bolster voter confidence in the election, von Spakovsky said.
The Pew Research Center survey found nine in 10 voters said they were “at least somewhat confident that votes cast in person were counted accurately, including 45% who say they are very confident.”
And after a spike in mail-in ballots cast during Covid created a flood of election integrity questions and concerns, voters post-2024 presidential election “are more confident than they were four years ago that absentee and mail-in ballots were counted as voters intended.”
“This is the result of a substantial increase in confidence in absentee vote counts among Republican candidate voters,” the report states.
That’s the power of watching, Nevada elections watchdog Muth said.
“People realize we’re watching now. If you step out of line, we’re going to catch you,” he said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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