A majority of likely voters believe cheating tainted President Joe Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump in last year’s election, a new Rasmussen Reports survey found.
A total of 56% of respondents are convinced “it’s likely that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election,” Rasmussen Reports said. That included 41% who said it was “very likely.”
Thirty-nine percent (39%) said it wasn’t likely the election was affected by cheating.
In April, 51% said Biden’s election was tainted by cheating — so the latest results show a 5% increase.
A whopping 84% of Republican voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that cheating affected the outcome of the November election. Unaffiliated voters (54%) and Democrats (32%) were less inclined to think that.
More whites (59%) than Black voters (47%) or other minorities (55%) think it is at least somewhat likely that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The latest Rasmussen survey also found that 65% of likely voters believe that wider use of mail-in voting will lead to more cheating in elections, including 51% who say it’s “very likely.”
A total of 28% said more mail-in voting will not mean more cheating, including 14% who said it was “not likely at all.”
The Rasmussen Reports survey is the latest to suggest that partisans remain divided on the issue of voting laws, though 95% agree with the goal of ending election cheating.
Most Democrats (67%) think mail-voting becoming permanent is a good policy. However, 73% of Republicans and 53% of unaffiliated voters think permanent vote-by-mail is a bad policy.
More Black voters (56%) than whites (38%) or other minorities (42%) believe it is a good policy to make vote-by-mail a permanent part of elections.
The suspicion that more mail-in voting will increase cheating is highest among Republicans (71%), followed by unaffiliated voters (55%). Only 30% of Democrats believe wider use of vote-by-mail will lead to more cheating in elections.
Voters under 40 are more likely than their elders to believe that wider use of vote-by-mail will lead to more cheating in elections, Rasmussen found.
The survey of 1,000 likely voters was conducted on Oct. 7 and 10, 2021 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
Rasmussen Reports previously found that voters are divided on whether Trump should run again in 2024, but most would vote for him in a race against either Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s notable that since the election, Trump has continued to press allegations of widespread fraud. State officials in several states have pressed for audits of the election results, and for election reforms they say would bolster identification requirements and make it harder to engineer a deception at the polls.
