What Does Rigged Mean? Partisan and Widely Shared Perceptions of Threats to Elections

Abstract

This article is a piece of a larger line of research supported by the Democracy Fund studying how to communicate about threats to elections in ways that do not dampen people’s desire to vote or make them question the integrity of electoral outcomes. It reports findings from a computerized text analysis of 2,970 open-ended survey responses in the field during the fall of 2018 to the prompt “when people say that elections are rigged, what do you think they mean?” Four key themes emerged in the data: (1) Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to regard electoral outcomes as predetermined, (2) Republicans were twice as likely to be concerned about illegal voting than Democrats, (3) Democrats were slightly more likely to be upset about money in politics than Republicans, and (4) Democrats were twice as likely to be preoccupied with Russian meddling than Republicans. A qualitative analysis of the first theme revealed both similarities across partisans as well as how Democrats focus on how threats to elections benefit people already in power, whereas Republicans worry that elections are threatened by ordinary people cheating. These findings, and the nuances contributing to them, raise new paths for research on communicating about elections without decreasing people’s faith in them.