Most Americans trust government-certified election results to some extent, but according to a recent poll, Republicans tend to rely their election confidence on a different source— Donald Trump— a stark figure that comes as the former President refuses to confirm that he will accept the election results if he loses.
The revealing study comes from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts. It was conducted with over 1,000 adults across the U.S. between July 29-August 8, 2024. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.
The survey shows that 67% of Republicans trust former President Trump and his campaign to provide accurate information about the presidential election outcome. Local TV News networks (58%), government certifications of election results (51%), and local newspapers (49%) are trailing right behind the current Republican nominee in that same category.
By contrast, only 19% of Republicans trust artificial intelligence, or a chatbot, to provide them this kind of information, which ranks in the last spot. Just above it are Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign (21%), social media (30%), and national newspapers (43%).
Democrats, on the other hand, rank government certifications of election results as their most trusted source to provide them information about election results, at 87%. Other sources they tend to highly trust include Harris and her campaign (82%), national TV news networks such as ABC, CBS, or NBC (80%), and local and national newspapers (77%).
The least trusted election results source for Democrats is Trump and his campaign, which stand at 11%. Other less trusted sources include AI (29%), social media (37%), and cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News or MSNBC (68%).
The survey comes as Trump's campaign continues to spew election rigging rhetoric, a strategy they've been employing since the 2020 elections, yet have been unable to provide proof of. In fact, dozens of Trump's court challenges failed, reviews, recounts and audits in battleground states all affirmed President Joe Biden's win, and Trump's own attorney general, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
But despite no evidence being provided of fraud in four years, a 2023 poll still found that most Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected for president.
Now, as the November elections quickly approach, Trump is further elevating his aggressive rhetoric, most recently threatening to jail people "involved in unscrupulous behavior:related to voting in the 2024 election, suggesting without evidence that the election could be stolen from him, The Washington Post reports.
"When I win, those people that cheated will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this depravity of justice does not happen again," the former president wrote on Saturday on his Truth Social platform. "We cannot let our country further devolve into a Third World Nation, and we won't!"
Election officials who are credibly found to have engaged in criminal activities are already prosecuted in the country. For instance, last month, Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado and Trump ally, was found guilty of seven charges connected to allowing a purported computer expert to copy election data from her office as Trump and his allies searched for evidence to prove their baseless claims of election fraud.
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