FILE - A non-partisan election volunteer observes as memory cards are uploaded from early voting at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, Nov. 5, 2024, in Atlanta, Mo. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
FILE - An election worker walks near voting machines at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, Nov. 5, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
FILE - People vote, Nov. 5, 2024, in Oak Creek, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, File)
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FILE - A non-partisan election volunteer observes as memory cards are uploaded from early voting at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, Nov. 5, 2024, in Atlanta, Mo. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
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FILE - An election worker walks near voting machines at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, Nov. 5, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Republicans say they are confident in the 2024 vote count after Donald Trump’s win, according to a new poll that finds a sharp turnaround from GOP voters’ skepticism about U.S. elections after the president-elect spent four years lying about his loss to President Joe Biden.
About 6 in 10 Republicans said they have “a great deal†or “quite a bit†of confidence that the votes in last year's presidential election were counted correctly nationwide, according to the poll from . That's a sharp rise from about 2 in 10 Republicans who were confident in an . And about two-thirds of Republicans in the new survey said they were confident in their state’s vote count, up from about 4 in 10 before the election.
That helped drive up the share of Americans saying they have “a great deal†or “quite a bit†of confidence in the accuracy of the election to about 6 in 10. That's higher than in October, when roughly half of Americans said they were highly confident the votes would be counted accurately.
The mood is substantially different than it was four years ago, when , fueled by his of a stolen election, and smashed their way on Jan. 6, 2021, to interrupt the certification of . Weeks later, found that about two-thirds of Republicans said Biden was not legitimately elected president.
That belief persisted throughout Biden's presidency and , as Trump about the accuracy of U.S. elections. He even did so in the hours before it was clear he would win.
But since Trump's victory in November, Republicans’ suspicions about election security at all levels — including confidence in their own local election officials — have ebbed substantially.
There were no indications of trouble before the election despite Trump’s attempts to to challenge the accuracy of the count if he lost the vote. Nor were there over the integrity of the 2020 count, which was confirmed by a wide range of state and , some of which were led by Republicans, including Trump’s own .
soared after 2020, leading to a wave of veteran administrators . In a potential sign that those hostilities might ease, the poll found that about 7 in 10 Americans have “a great deal†or “quite a bit†of confidence that votes in the 2024 presidential election were counted accurately by their local election officials, up from about 6 in 10 in October.
That movement was almost entirely driven by Republicans: About 7 in 10 were highly confident in local officials’ counts in December, compared with about half in October.
One group's confidence in the integrity of the election ticked down — Democrats. Their confidence in the national vote count declined from about 7 in 10 to about 6 in 10, although their certainty in the accuracy of state vote counts remained stable.
Still, the dip in Democratic confidence is nowhere near the scale of skepticism among Republicans after Trump's defeat in 2020. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, the day after Election Day and there has been no organized Democratic effort to prevent the handover of the presidency to Trump, as there was among some conservatives in 2020 to try to block Biden from ascending to the presidency.
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Riccardi reported from Denver.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,251 adults was conducted Dec. 5-9, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
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