With a week to go before Election Day, two-thirds of Americans believe Russia or other foreign governments will try to influence the midterms, according to a new national survey by Pew Research Center.
Two years after Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, Pew found that party affiliation strongly shapes the concern with 80 percent of Democrats saying they worry about meddling compared to 53 percent of Republicans.
Overall, there is not much faith that the federal government “is making serious efforts to protect election systems” from hacking and other technological threats with only 13 percent very confident efforts are underway and 42 percent somewhat confident.
Foreign hacking fears cut across partisan lines with 45 percent — regardless of party — are very or somewhat confident that election systems are secure from hacking and just 8 percent saying they are very confident in the security of election systems nationwide.
There is also little confidence in the leading U.S. tech companies to prevent election interference.
Firms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have a responsibility to prevent misuse of their platforms to influence the midterms, according to large majority of the public, 76 percent, including sizable shares in both parties. But just a third, 33 percent, said they were very or somewhat confident that the Silicon Valley giants will achieve this objective.
Pew conducted the major survey of public attitudes on voting and elections in the U.S. from Sept. 24 to Oct. 7 among 10,683 adults, with a plus or minus 1.5 percentage point margin of error.
Despite concerns over foreign election meddling and security, Americans have very positive feelings about voting as an overall 91 percent said voting in elections is “important,” while 68 percent said that “voting gives people like me some say about how government runs things.”
A majority of Americans were found to be confident on the local level, with nearly nine-in-10, 89 percent, having confidence in poll workers in their community to do a good job, and majorities said the same about local and state election officials.
Other major findings from the survey included that Republicans were far less likely than Democrats to favor easing the voting process.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 65 percent, were found to favor automatically registering all eligible citizens to vote and making Election Day a national holiday.
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