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There are many factors that should come
into consideration when voters evaluate their level of confidence in how
elections are run. The voter should think about the voting technology being
used, for instance, and whether the voting machines have been subject to appropriate
pre- and post-election audits for reliability and security. The voter
should also think about the infrastructure in place for ensuring that ballots
are recorded accurately and tabulated without fault. However, should the
results of the election have any bearing on whether the election itself was run
fairly?
This notion was brought up by the Pew
Center on the States in a February 2012 report titled Election
Administration by the Numbers: An Analysis of Available Datasets and How to Use
Them. In it, they found that political partisanship appears to have a link
to voters' confidence that the ballots are being counted correctly and as
intended.
More specifically, the report found data
showing “that many voters have more confidence in the election system's
integrity when their candidate has won.” This could have to do with the
psychological effect that winning and losing may have. If their preferred
candidate wins, the voter is then pleased with the election result and thus may
also have positive feelings toward the election infrastructure. Conversely, if
the preferred candidate loses, the voter is then displeased with the election
results and may be – consciously or unconsciously – seeking reasons why the
results didn't go the way they had hoped. One of these reasons, in their mind,
is a possible lack of integrity in the election system.
Of course, the legitimacy of a government
is inherently tied to the confidence that voters have in election results. If
the electorate feels that an election is rigged or otherwise compromised, they
may feel that the elected government is there unjustly. As the administrative
bodies in charge of running an election should be unbiased and objective, they
should have no direct connection whatsoever with the party that ends up winning
the election. Even so, voter perception can be very powerful.
The Pew Center report looks specifically at
the American general elections of 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010. When George W.
Bush, a Republican, won the presidency in 2004, 81.5 percent of Republicans
were “very confident” that their vote was counted accurately, but this number
fell to 74.2 percent in the 2008 election that saw Democrat Barack Obama win
the presidency. Conversely, only 56.9 percent of Democrats were “very
confident” that their vote was counted correctly in 2004, rising to 74.8
percent in the 2008 election.
Interestingly, the level of confidence in
regards to the nationwide ballots as a whole was recorded as being lower by
voters of both parties when compared to the confidence that the voters had in
the accurate tabulation of their own votes. As an aggregate, the confidence of
voters in the United States that the election as a whole was conducted fairly
has hovered at around 50 percent. That's very low, especially when compared to
the 89 percent of those polled in Denmark. However, the same partisan effect
demonstrated on an individual voter basis also persisted on national
perception.
A mere 20.7 percent of Democrats were “very
confident” that votes across the country were tabulated accurately in the 2004
election, compared to 75.0 percent of Republicans. When Barack Obama won in
2008, the trend reversed: 53.9 percent of Democrats were very confident,
whereas only around 30% of Republicans were very confident in the accurate
counting of votes in the 2008 presidential election.
Even though partisanship should not play a
role in determining how confident a voter is that ballots are being counted
accurately, it is clear that political allegiances do have an impact. Perhaps a
greater move toward using even more impartial third parties to administer
elections is the solution to this problem, helping to elevate voter confidence
with better audits and greater transparency in the electoral system.
