One-Third Of Americans Believe Voter Fraud Helped Joe Biden Win The Election, ‘NPR’ Poll Says
A new NPR/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday revealed that one-third of respondents believe that voter fraud helped President-elect Joe Biden win the 2020 election. The publication noted that the Justice Department, courts, and election officials have yet to substantiate theories of widespread voter fraud influencing the election — as Donald Trump and his allies continue to claim.
According to the survey, two-thirds of the Republicans surveyed claimed that voter fraud helped Biden defeat the head of state, and less than half of the same group accepted the outcome of the election. Conversely, just 11 percent of Democrats surveyed believed that voter fraud played a role in Biden’s victory, while the remaining percentage of this group accepted the outcome of the 2020 electoral results.
Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos, suggested that the findings — among the others in the survey — reflect an increase in the influence of misinformation in American society.
“Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn’t have any basis in reality or fact,” he said.
“What this poll really illustrates to me is how willing people are to believe things that are ludicrous because it fits in with a worldview that they want to believe.”
NPR suggested that Trump plays a role in the spread of inaccurate information that appears to be growing in America.
“The president is himself a major source of misinformation, as he continues to make baseless claims about election fraud on Twitter and elsewhere,” the publication wrote. “Conservative media also have devoted hours of coverage to exaggerated or debunked claims.”
Regardless of the causes of the purported rise in misinformation, polling continues to suggest a divide over the 2020 election. As The Inquisitr reported, a recent Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that just 56 percent of likely U.S. voters surveyed viewed Biden as their president, while 34 percent said he is not their president and the remaining percentage said they weren’t sure. Another survey by the pollster found that almost half of Americans believe that the Democratic Party stole the election.
The belief that voter fraud is a rampant force in elections has pushed some to reconsider participating in the Georgia Senate runoffs. Investigative journalist Marcus Baram noted on Twitter last month that some Trump supporters on Parler were floating the idea of a boycott. More recently, Trump-supporting lawyer Lin Wood called for Republican voters in Georgia to sit out the runoffs, which he suggested would reveal that the elections are rigged by breaking the algorithm supposedly used to skew the results in favor of Biden.