More than one-third of Mainers said they are not confident the votes will be counted accurately in the upcoming presidential election, according to a new survey.
While 60% of Mainers said they were confident that votes will be accurately tallied, 35% said they disagreed in a survey of 1,036 residents conducted by Colby College’s Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, the Maine Community Foundation and Rockland-based research firm Public Engagement Partners.
Those figures vary widely by party affiliation, the survey found. Among Democrats, 88% said they were confident about the counts – double the rate among Republicans, which was 44%. Among independent voters, the proportion was 45%.
Mainers with lower incomes, less education, those who live in northern parts of the state and older residents were somewhat less likely to trust the tally, the survey found.
Nicholas Jacobs, faculty associate director of the Goldfarb Center, said the report highlight’s Maine’s unique strengths and weaknesses in civic life and aimed to capture a fair representation of the state’s 16 counties. He added that it also represents a relatively even mixture of Democrats, Republicans and independent voters.
He said the results represent, in part, an erosion of political trust alongside broader “social trust.”
More than half of respondents said they trust people in their local and state communities, but only 30% said they trusted Americans nationally, Jacobs noted.
Quixada Moore-Vissing, director of Public Engagement Partners, said the survey overall shows “considerable civic strengths” in Maine, including higher-than-average voter turnout and public meeting attendance.
“However, there are some red flags for Maine, including the fact that most Mainers feel youth will have to move away for opportunities, trust in both state and national government is low, and many Mainers do not feel they matter to their local community,” Moore-Vissing said in a statement. “And, while most Mainers have confidence that their vote in the upcoming election will be fairly counted, over one-third have concerns.”
Local trust in the election count appears to broadly follow national trends, though the new report found a greater partisan divide than the national average.
Nationally, 61% of Americans expressed confidence that the election will be conducted fairly and accurately in a poll released in August by the Pew Research Center. That poll also found stark divides between Democrats, 77% of whom expressed confidence in the election, and Republicans, for whom that figure was 47%.
Jacobs said the scale of distrust in the federal elections process reflects a trend of politics becoming increasingly “hyper-nationalized” in recent years.
“If we ask people about Maine’s elections, confidence is much higher, but if we ask about national elections, Mainers are tapped into the same national political narrative as everybody else,” Jacobs said. “We’re no longer privileged enough to only see politics through our particular local lens.”
The report was released Wednesday, drawing on information from the U.S. Census Bureau and data from a survey fielded in April, the college said in a statement. That means the data was collected before Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and before either of the presidential or vice presidential debates.
Jacobs said he “wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of the measures,” particularly faith in the national election and trust of government overall, shifted in the months since his team collected its data. But he said the survey aimed to tackle issues and feelings that echo well beyond the election cycle.
“We wanted to think about democracy and politics outside the chaos, quite frankly, of campaigns and elections,” Jacobs said. “Our democratic well-being or confidence in government, those beliefs are going to exist long after a candidate leaves the race or president retires from office. A lot of these (findings), I do think, tap into fundamental core values that campaigns don’t shake, at least in the short run.”
The report also found that 70% of Mainers feel hopeful about the state’s future, though they are pessimistic about the future of the nation as a whole, according to the report. Most also worry about young people having to move out of state to find better opportunities.
Forty-six percent of those surveyed had mixed feelings about newcomers moving to Maine, while 18% said recent influxes were a “bad thing” and 35% said they were a “good thing,” according to survey. Education was a dividing factor here, with 48% of Mainers with at least a bachelor’s degree calling the development a positive change compared with 26% of those with a high school degree or less.
Jacobs said the survey’s findings appear to reflect a complicated relationship between Mainers’ concerns about the state changing and losing its distinctive character, while also recognizing that some changes feel “inevitable or necessary” to its survival.
The study also found that six out of 10 Mainers believe that finding common ground is achievable. Compared with the national average, Mainers were also more likely to follow the news, discuss current events with friends and family, and attend public meetings, the survey found.
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