Wyoming Has High Public Confidence in State Election Integrity According to UWYO Survey
Despite the questions of the accuracy of vote counts in the 2020 presidential election continuing to roil American politics, a recent poll of Wyoming residents conducted by the University of Wyoming finds the people of Equality State have great confidence in how elections are handled.
94 percent of survey respondents say they are “very confident” or “somewhat confident” that their votes will be counted accurately in Wyoming this year. At the same time, Wyomingites continued to be split on the accuracy of the vote counts across the nation in 2020.
The University of Wyoming’s Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center’s Survey Research Center conducted telephone interviews with 436 Wyoming residents selected at random from October 22 to November 3. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points, according to a release.
The survey’s director and a professor of political science, Jim King, says the poll results fit patterns found elsewhere in the United States.
“A national survey conducted in mid-October by the Pew Research Center found 90 percent of Americans believing this year’s elections will be administered ‘very well’ or ‘somewhat well.’ The difference between our Wyoming poll and the national poll can be attributed to the margin of error that is present in any survey,” King says.
There are minor differences across political affiliations, according to King.
King also added, “five out of six Democrats, 83 percent, report being very confident in election administration, compared to 64 percent of independents and 56 percent of Republicans. Nonetheless, when the two highest levels of confidence are combined, the partisan differences disappear, with 98 percent of Democrats, 95 percent of Republicans and 92 percent of independents reporting being very confident or somewhat confident in the administration of elections in Wyoming.”
Perspectives on the accuracy of the vote counts in the last presidential election have not changed over the past two years.
King said that immediately after the 2020 election, 48 percent of Wyoming's survey respondents expressed confidence in the accuracy of the presidential vote count nationwide and that the comparable figure in this year’s survey is 50 percent, a statistically insignificant difference.
Whereas before, partisan differences are evident, with 33 percent of Republicans, 58 percent of independents, and 98 percent of Democrats confident of the accuracy of the 2020 vote count.