Disagreements About Threats to Electoral Integrity: Beliefs About the Severity and Frequency of Fraudulent, Uncounted, and Forgone Votes in the 2020 and 2024 Elections

In a series of surveys and survey experiments (n = 14,700) conducted during the 2020 and 2024 elections, we deployed novel measures of concerns about election integrity to investigate beliefs about the frequency and severity of different election errors. In these studies, we measured beliefs about three types of errors: counting fraudulent ballots, failing to count legitimately cast ballots, and causing eligible voters to be unable to vote. In abstract descriptions of election errors (Study 1, 2020 and 2024) and vignettes describing errors alongside other features (Study 2, 2020 and 2024), we find that Republicans believed fraudulent votes were both more frequent and more serious than did Democrats, with the opposite pattern for forgone votes. In the ex-ante choices between election rules (Study 3, only 2020), we find that Democrats give much greater weight to concerns about forgone votes (turnout) than do Republicans. Overall, these three studies point to the importance of improved measurement to understand individual- and group-level differences in concerns about threats to electoral integrity.