Who Do You Trust to Conduct Elections Fairly?

Vote here sign. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Ever since 2020, Donald Trump has tried to convince voters that election results are inaccurate and untrustworthy. Has he succeeded?

A version of that question was asked during the March 2026 Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin voters: Whom do you trust more to ensure that elections in Wisconsin are conducted fairly and accurately?

Who do you trust to conduct elections fairly and accurately

The graph summarizes responses to that question. Almost 80% of respondents chose Wisconsin state and local election officials over the federal government under Donald Trump.

The next chart breaks down the responses according to the voters’ political identity. In this tabulation, voters identifying as independents were asked whether they mainly identified with Democrats or Republicans and were treated separately.

The results show that 99% of those self-identifying as Democrats preferred state and local officials, as did 98% of Democratic leaners. More surprising is that a majority of Republicans chose state and local officials, as did a majority of Republican leaners. This suggests there are a substantial number of Republicans who recognize that Trump lies, as reflected in his insistence that he won the 2020 election and his current, unproven claim that noncitizens are “rampant” in American elections.

Whom do you trust?

Donald Trump is very fond of spreading such rumors. This gives him the freedom to claim that lost elections were won but stolen, even though he has been unable to come up with evidence for his accusations.

The next graph tabulates the responses to a Marquette poll question in December 2022 that asked, “How confident are you that, here in Wisconsin, the votes in this November’s election will be accurately cast and counted? Very confident, somewhat confident, not too confident, or not at all confident?”

Dark blue columns represent the number of respondents who expected that the votes would be accurately cast and counted. For example, only 20% of Republicans were very confident that the election result would be reported accurately. By contrast, 76% of Democrats were strongly confident that the count would be accurate.

Confidence that December 2022 election results will accurately reflect the vote

This same question was repeated in the most recent Marquette poll. The results are similar to the ones above, except for the substantial decline in the number of Democrats and Democratic leaners who describe themselves as being very confident in the accuracy of the results.

It is worth noting that Joe Biden was president at the time of the December 2022 poll. He was subsequently replaced by Trump, who believed that the appropriate response to bad poll numbers was to fire the person in charge of the poll.

Confidence in results of the election: March 2025

The same pattern exists when it comes to how often noncitizens vote illegally. The poll finds that 34% of Republicans believe the answer is “often” and 49% put the answer at “sometimes.” A total of 90% of Democrats and Democratic leaners, by contrast, chose “never” or “hardly ever.”

How often do non-citizens vote?

All attempts to measure instances of illegal voting have found that such voting was extremely rare. Yet President Trump and other election deniers continue to claim that voting by undocumented immigrants is rampant while citing no evidence. The likely result of using bad data is bad policymaking.