This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s collaboration with Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting. Sign up for Votebeat’s free newsletters here.
Harrisburg, Pa. — Pennsylvania voters are more likely to trust local election results over presidential ones, with overall confidence in the integrity of voting systems split along partisan lines, a new Spotlight PA poll shows.
Voting experts were encouraged by the poll’s finding that voter confidence is strongest at the county level, which is where elections are actually run in Pennsylvania.
The poll asked likely voters three questions about their confidence that 2024 election results at the national, statewide, and county levels would be “counted fairly and accurately.”
Sixty-three percent of respondents were very or somewhat confident that votes for president will be counted fairly and accurately nationally, while 64% said the same about statewide elections in Pennsylvania. Confidence jumped to 78% when those polled were asked about their own county’s results.
The poll was conducted by the MassINC Polling Group between Sept. 12 and 18.
In Pennsylvania, county officials handle the day-to-day work of running elections, and oversee the sorting and counting of ballots. They handle the logistics for polling places, organize the printing of ballots, and decide on rules, such as whether or not to have mail ballot drop boxes. They also test voting machines and secure them in a safe location where they cannot be tampered with.
“It’s great to see overwhelming confidence for the election,” said Kyle Miller, a policy advocate with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy. “And to see that number jump to 78% when it is the county … for the environment that we’re in, it really shows that people do have confidence in their local governments.”
Miller said the results are also in line with American’s feelings about individual U.S. representatives versus Congress. Polling last year from the Pew Research Center found that while only 26% of respondents had a favorable opinion of Congress, 41% had a “very good” or “somewhat good” view of their own U.S. House representative.
Still, the Spotlight PA poll revealed deep partisan differences. Roughly 80% of Democratic respondents said they were very confident in all three levels of election results. Just 12% and 13% of Republicans said the same for national and statewide results, respectively.
Respondents who reported a favorable view of former President Donald Trump, this year’s Republican presidential nominee, had a similar lack of confidence in national and statewide election results. Since 2016, Trump has repeatedly and falsely maligned elections as tainted with fraud. Philadelphia has been a particular target of his, an attack he repeated at a recent rally in Erie.
His rhetoric appears to have been successful, as recent polling shows more Republican voters say they trust Trump and his campaign for election results, rather than government sources.
Still, the Spotlight PA poll showed that Republican confidence increased sharply when asked about results at the county level. When asked if countywide election results would be counted fairly and accurately, the percentage of Republicans who said they were very confident jumped to 28%.
That spike mirrors rhetoric over the past few years from Republican county leaders, who have said they can attest for the integrity of their local system, but could not speak to others.
“We were buttoned up here in Washington County,” Republican Commissioner Nick Sherman said in 2021, directing unfounded allegations at big urban counties instead. “We got to go to Allegheny County. We got to go to Philadelphia County, where the real fraud took place.”
Miller said that efforts by former elected Republicans to explain how the system works can help bolster those numbers. Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic organization that counts among its board members former Pennsylvania Govs. Tom Corbett and Tom Ridge, both Republicans, is one group doing that work.
“Learning more about the process as it unfolds I think helps people build more trust,” Miller added. “We’ve seen people who thought there was nefarious things happening at the polls but then spent a day as a poll worker and really understood the process and how it’s not really that easy to cheat.”
Commenting on the Spotlight PA poll results, Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said election directors statewide are committed to ensuring a fair and accurate process.
“All the election directors I’ve ever talked with take their responsibility very seriously,” she said. “From one county to the next, from one state to the next.”
Schaefer said counties have also been proactively trying to bolster trust in the system. Election officials are going to community events, implementing live video feeds of their operations, and putting out video explainers of the work they do.
The Pennsylvania Department of State has been just as active. Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt has been doing a blitz of media appearances in recent weeks and participating in events where the public has an opportunity to ask questions.
At an event in Gettysburg in September, several people asked Schmidt about election processes for nearly an hour. One person asked him about what would happen if someone tried to derail certification of the election. Schmidt responded that if a county declined to certify, the department “would immediately seek a court order requiring them to do their job.”
Commenting on the poll results, Matt Heckel, press secretary for the department, said it was encouraging to see people express confidence in their local election officials. He suggested Pennsylvanians become poll workers so they can see the operation from the inside.
Lauren Cristella, president of the Philadelphia-based Committee of Seventy, which advocates for good government, said the results show local election officials can be “trusted messengers” in their communities. Cristella pointed to events hosted by Keep Our Republic where local election officials have participated.
She thinks the more that can be done to explain how ballots get counted, how mail votes are processed, and how other election systems work, the more people will understand just how unlikely fraud is at any level.
“It’s incumbent upon all of us to do that public education work to illuminate the process in every county,” she said. “Not just for our own voters, but across the commonwealth.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
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