JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A new UNF poll released Wednesday found a large portion of likely voters in Florida don’t have much faith in the results of elections, especially the 2020 presidential race.
A UNF statewide poll conducted last week by the Public Opinion Research Lab (PORL) asked a random sample of 622 registered, likely Florida voters a series of questions about who they planned to vote for in the upcoming midterms and their perceptions surrounding the prevalence of voter fraud.
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When asked how often there is an election with enough fraudulent voting to affect the outcome, 34% said less than 1% of races, with 54% saying it happens more frequently. And 12% said that substantial voter fraud occurs in over half of all races.
In a related question, respondents were asked who they think won the 2020 election between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, based on receiving the most votes cast by eligible voters in enough states to win. In response to that, 50% of people said Biden definitely won the election, and 19% said Trump definitely won.
The margin of sampling error for the total sample is +/- 4.7%, according to PORL.
“Most of the research in this area suggests impactful voter fraud is rare, well under 1% of elections,” said Dr. Michael Binder, PORL faculty director and UNF professor of political science. “But most people seem to think it’s much more prevalent. This general distrust in elections is pretty clear when you look at perceptions of the 2020 election, with only half of respondents convinced Biden really won.”
Many of the false claims about widespread voter fraud have been perpetuated by Republicans, including Trump.
But last week a federal judge said in a ruling that former President Trump signed legal documents challenging the results of the 2020 election that included voter fraud claims he knew to be false.
The judge specifically cited claims from Trump’s attorneys that Fulton County in Georgia had improperly counted more than 10,000 votes of dead people, felons and unregistered voters. Those false allegations were part of a filing that Trump’s legal team made in Georgia state court on Dec. 4, 2021.
Multiple tallies of Georgia’s 5 million votes cast for president, including one done by hand, showed President Biden won the state. Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has insisted that Georgia’s election was accurate and secure. Officials in other states and federal investigators, including Trump’s own attorney general, have said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 contest.
Critics have said Trump’s “big lie” of election fraud escalated and transformed into marching orders that summoned supporters to Washington and then sent them to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to block Biden’s victory.
To ensure a representative sample of likely voters, PORL said the 10 Florida designated media market areas were stratified into 18 different strata. Heavily urban and highly educated counties were separated out from their media markets and given their own strata. Respondents were contacted by live callers via the telephone from 4:30 to 9 p.m. daily with up to three callbacks attempted.
To read more results from the poll, visit the UNF PORL website.