Election fraud claims are just that — a fraud
The looming 1980 presidential election was all over the news, the unpopular incumbent Jimmy Carter facing the charismatic former actor and California Gov. Ronald Reagan. A college junior in Boone walked into the Watauga County Board of Elections sometime in September and registered to vote in his first presidential election.
On Election Day of that year, Nov. 4, that same kid cast a vote for John Anderson, the Independent from Illinois who garnered 6.6% of the vote while Reagan won a landslide victory over Carter.
That kid was me. At the time I was a raging independent who did not dare be aligned with any group think, a pseudo intellectual who loved campus life and the back-and-forth political banter during beer-soaked late-night get-togethers in poorly heated, dank apartments. That proud independent turned to the political left as Ronald Reagan’s eight-year presidency progressed.
More important than my political views during that era, though, was a very strong, unyielding faith in the integrity of the American system of casting ballots, counting votes and leaders assuming the office they had just won or bowing out with integrity if they lost. Nowadays, that’s unfortunately just not the case even though there has been no proof whatsoever of any voter fraud or widespread conspiracies to promote voter fraud for one candidate or another. Not a shred.
But perception, as they say, is reality. Here are the findings of a just-released poll form Catawba College and YouGov: “75 percent of North Carolinians are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ confident that their vote will be accurately counted in their county in 2024’s general election, while 71 percent are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ confident in the integrity of the 2024 election in North Carolina.”
Those conducting the poll view these results as showing that most voters have confidence in the voting process, particularly that the count in their home counties will be correct. To me, though, the other side of this coin is much more telling.
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If 29% of the state’s residents don’t have confidence in the integrity of the election, that portends a potential for serious blowback after the November vote. One only need remember the chaos fueled by Donald Trump’s furious claims after the 2020 election to fear that something similar or even worse might erupt in a couple of months.
Polling numbers have consistently shown that many Americans don’t have faith that our elections are conducted fairly and believe Trump’s claims about voter fraud. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released Aug. 30 showed that 17% of all voters aren’t prepared to accept the outcome of the November election. More alarming, 34% — one in three — “lacks confidence” that votes will be accurately counted.
Here’s another finding of that poll: 96% of Democrats think President Joe Biden was legitimately elected; 66% of independents and just 30% of Republicans.
Look, we can argue politics until we’re red in the face but the integrity of our systems, our institutions, that isn’t something in which opinions matter. As a journalist I’ve been covering elections since my first job in Zebulon, North Carolina, in 1987. I’ve watched election officials hand count votes, watched them tally computer tabs, even seen them painstakingly scribble results on chalkboards and tally them up to make sure all was correct. I’ve seen local Republican and Democrat officials oversee the canvassing of votes and everyone agreeing that all was done according to the rules in place. I’ve seen a few votes thrown out due to voter error, inability to determine who the vote was cast for, or some other mishap, but never anything close to widespread election fraud. The system works. The mistrust of our election systems is misplaced, plain and simple.
(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
