Overall Trust in Election Process Rebounded in 2024

Today marks four years since the U.S. Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, when an estimated 2,000 supporters of the Republican Party’s then-presidential candidate Donald Trump stormed the building in an attempted self-coup d'état. Among the rioters were members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist U.S. group.

The attack took place after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to his opponent and Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden and was timed to stop a joint session of Congress to certify the election results. In the build up to the event, Trump had falsely claimed that the election was fraudulent multiple times, including during a speech to his supporters which took place imminently before. He was later impeached by the Democratic-led House of Representatives for “incitement of insurrection.”

Pew Research Center conducted a poll on the topic in November 2020 and again in November 2024, in light of the latest election round. It found that in 2024, voters were generally positive about how the elections were conducted and had more confidence in the results than in 2020. This change was largely driven by the sentiments among Republican Party voters.

In 2020, just 64 percent of Republican voters were confident that in-person ballots had been counted correctly. This figure shot up to 94 percent when survey participants were asked the same question in 2024 (after Trump won the vote), overtaking the confidence levels of Harris voters. Republican voters were even more skeptical of absentee or mail-in ballots in 2020, with only one in five saying that they were confident that such votes were counted correctly. This jumped to seven in ten (72 percent) in 2024.

It stands to reason that a higher share of voters will want to believe that their chosen candidate wins - something reflected in the responses of both parties of voters. In 2020, 98 percent of Democratic Party voters thought the in-person ballots were counted correctly and 95 percent thought the same for absentee and mail-in votes. While these figures dropped when Trump was elected in 2024, a large majority of Democratic Party in-person and mail-in voters still had confidence in the voting system and believed the outcome.

Even though 72 percent of Republican voters were at least somewhat confident that mail-in votes were counted correctly in the 2024 election, the figure is 6 percentage points lower than their counterpart respondents.