By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
A new Rasmussen survey released this week has revealed a majority of voters “continue to suspect widespread election fraud, and expect cheating at the ballot box to influence the 2024 presidential election.”
The report came as Republican frontrunner and former President Donald Trump was indicted on multiple charges—the first time in the nation’s history a former chief executive has been criminally prosecuted—which a majority of likely voters believe is a bad move for the country.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden remains persistent he is running for a second term, which could produce a rematch between him and Trump next year, provided the former president makes it through the primaries.
According to Rasmussen, a “national telephone and online survey finds that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters believe cheating is likely to affect the outcome of the next presidential election, including 30% who think it’s Very Likely. Forty-one percent (41%) say election cheating is unlikely to affect the 2024 outcome, including 24% who consider it Not at All Likely.”
The survey of 1,003 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on June 7-8 and 11, by Rasmussen Reports, the veteran polling firm said. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for the survey was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC.
Hardcore Trump supporters believe the prosecution is being mounted as a political effort to prevent the former president from being elected for a second term. Many gun owners recall Trump as the only president in recent memory to have consistently made remarks in his speeches about protecting the Second Amendment.
The new Rasmussen survey found that 52 percent of voters believe cheating “likely affected the outcomes of some races in last year’s midterm elections, including 30% who say it’s very likely.” On the other hand, 38 percent disagree, including 25 percent who think cheating wasn’t very likely at all.
“In April, 60 percent believed the 2022 midterms had been affected by cheating,” Rasmussen said.
With the 2024 presidential campaign already ramping up—the field of Republican hopefuls is getting bigger with Thursday’s announcement by Miami, Fla., Mayor Francis Suarez that he is joining the GOP list of White House hopefuls—it may take a program to sort them out. Still, Trump remains at the head of the pack and many believe he will only expand his lead as a result of criminal charges.
“On the question of which party they trust more to protect the integrity of elections,” Rasmussen said, “voters are almost evenly divided, with 40 percent saying they trust Republicans more and 39 percent trusting Democrats more, while another 20 percent are not sure.”
Rasmussen said this “mostly reflects the partisan division of the electorate. Seventy–four percent of both Democrats and Republicans trust their own party more to protect election integrity. Among Independents, 37 percent trust Republicans more and 29 percent trust Democrats more to protect the integrity of elections.
Last week, when Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy heaped criticism on the Trump indictment, calling it “an affront to every citizen: we cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents,” 58 percent of voters agreed. However, 34 percent disagreed.
