Who Do You Trust to Conduct Elections Fairly?
Polls show big splits between Wisconsin Democrats, Republicans and independents.
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?
The graph below summarizes responses to that question. Almost 80% of respondents chose Wisconsin state and local election officials over the federal government under Donald Trump.
Whom do you trust to conduct elections fairly and accurately?
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.
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Data Wonk
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So, who should we trust to run elections,
– Those folks who agree with the data that voting is secure or
– Those folks who disagree with the data that voting is secure?
Many Republicans simply don’t want you to vote and will do anything to discredit the process.
Racine native and ALEC founder Paul Weyrich famously stated (in 1980, so GOP has been thinking like this for quite some time)
“So many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down”.
Thanks to Thom Hartmann for drumming this quote into my head over the years because corporate media certainly wants to ignore inconvenient truths like this and instead engage in “both sides-ism”.
From the very beginning of his “political career” our orange-faced Felon-In-Chief has used every available opportunity to implant in the heads of his mindless followers his unhinged, baseless, and disproven lie that all United States elections are rife with fraud. That position was the basis for the January 6th insurrection, for which Frump was inexplicably not impeached, and to this day has not been held accountable for.
reTrumplicans know that the more people that vote in any election, the greater the odds are that their candidates will lose, so they go out of their way to try to suppress voter rights with the claim that they are protecting the integrity of elections, when in fact they are doing all they can to minimize the number of people that actually vote.
As in Independent voter, I believe the democratic and logical answer to who should we trust to conduct elections fairly is very definitively represented by the graphs included in this story.