More than 43 percent of likely voters wouldn’t trust the integrity of the election result if state election officials sent unsolicited mail ballot requests or mail ballots to everyone on the voter rolls, according to a national Epoch Times survey conducted by Big Data Poll. Nearly 57 percent said they would trust the result.
Democrats are waging a well-funded legal campaign across the nation to make it easier to vote by mail. They are litigating at least 80 of the more than 100 vote-by-mail court cases across the nation. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has said that his party had more than 600 lawyers working on election related cases.
President Donald Trump opposes a universal vote-by-mail election, arguing that it’s an invitation for fraud and opens the door to Election Day chaos due to the inefficiency of the U.S. Postal Service.
More than half of Republicans (56 percent) said they wouldn’t trust the integrity of the election in case of universal access to mail ballots. Democrats expressed much more comfort with mail-in voting, with more than 3 in 4 saying they would trust the integrity of the outcome.
White voters expressed less confidence about a mail by vote election (53.7 percent) than black voters (68.5 percent) and Hispanic voters (62.9 percent).
Trump recently endorsed mail-in voting in Florida, explaining that the Republican governors there have done a good job organizing an effective system. But the president has strongly opposed universal vote-by-mail in other states, including Nevada, where Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak called in an emergency legislative session on Aug. 3 and rushed through a mail-in voting measure.
Logan Churchwell, communications director for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Epoch Times that a massive influx of mail ballots will likely lead to an Election Day with no clear winner called.
“Election night is not going to be results night just because you have so many states that do not have the institutional experience in mass mail elections. They certainly aren’t as equipped to process all that paperwork coming back,” Churchwell said.
Republicans generally push for safeguards—such as a witness signature—to protect the integrity of each mail ballot. Democrats say such measures amount to voter suppression. According to Churchwell, the suppression argument is novel and hasn’t been brought up in recent election cycles.
The results were weighted based on gender, age, race, education, and region. The partisan affiliation breakdown was 36 percent Democrat, 32 percent Republican, and 32 percent independent/other, mirroring the Aristotle National Voter File Database.
The Epoch Times National Poll was conducted by Big Data Poll and interviewed 2,169 likely voters nationwide sourced via voter file-verified online survey panels from Aug. 26 to Aug. 30. The sampling error is plus or minus 2.1 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval.
