For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Justin Giorgio
[email protected]
WISCONSIN – Yesterday, Democracy Defense Project – Wisconsin board members Fmr. Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, Attorney General JB Van Hollen, and U.S. Rep. Scott Klug joined veteran pollster Dave Sackett and WisPolitics for a lunch to discuss the latest polling surrounding voter attitudes toward election integrity with just a week to go before the Wisconsin primary election.
The full poll can be found HERE.
“My goal is to do one thing: make sure folks know that when they vote, it’s going to get counted,” said fmr. Attorney General JB Van Hollen. Fmr. Lt. Gov Mandela Barnes added “I’m looking to get involved in anything that is going to get more people to the polls. Much of the discussion around election integrity, I worry, is about suppressing the vote which is something this Democracy can’t afford.”
Check out some of the coverage from yesterday’s event:
Wisconsin Examiner:
Organizers of the bipartisan group, which launched in June, say they want to rebuild trust in the electoral system and defend the democratic process. The organization is targeting battleground states including Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania, to foster greater confidence in election outcomes, improve voter participation and “move beyond polarizing rhetoric and lies.”
Two Republicans, former Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and former U.S. Rep. Scott Klug, and two Democrats, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former Wisconsin Democratic State Party Chair Mike Tate, lead the organization in Wisconsin.
…In a survey conducted for the Democracy Defense Project of about 600 “likely” Wisconsin voters, 48% of respondents said they were “very confident” that votes will be accurately cast in the 2024 election – more than in the national survey, in which just 42% of voters said they were “very confident.”
“There are one out of four people who are going to cast a vote in this election in 2024 who right now are not confident that we’re going to be accurately passed and counted,” said Dave Sackett, a pollster for the Tarrance Group.
Sackett identified policies that he said could help improve people’s confidence in elections, though he noted that many of them are already in use.
“If you’re not an election worker, if you’re not an elected official, if you’re not county registrar, you don’t know these things exist, so this is all going to be new information” Sackett said.
WisPolitics:
The poll found that three in four Wisconsin voters have confidence votes will be accurately cast and counted in the Badger State, but that voters also have concerns. Wisconsin voters believe the three biggest threats to election integrity, according to the poll, are: media organizations that suppress, exaggerate or distort; AI creating election misinformation; and foreign adversaries spreading propaganda-influencing elections.
“Over half of Republicans, 52%, say ‘I am not confident in the integrity of elections in this country.’ Democrats: only 5%. There’s a vast difference based on partisanship,” Sackett added. The corresponding numbers in Wisconsin are 47% Republican and 3% Democratic, according to the poll.
“I was surprised that [independents] were as skeptical as they were,” Klug said of the poll results, which found roughly a third of independent voters nationally and 19% in Wisconsin lacked confidence in election integrity. “I thought there were people who were frustrated by the candidates, but not frustrated by the system.”
…”Probably 50 to 55% of the things that we need to do to improve people’s perceptions of the integrity of elections are things that are already being done, but nobody knows. it needs to be part of our messaging,” Sackett said.
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More information on the Democracy Defense Project can be found at
https://www.democracydefenseproject.org/wi.
Published: Aug 8, 2024
