Young NC voters less likely to trust that the 2020 election will be legitimate
Young voters in North Carolina are much less trusting than everyone else that this year’s election will be fair, a new poll reveals.
Results from a new Elon Poll survey, commissioned by The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer, indicate that nearly 70% of North Carolina registered voters trust that the 2020 election will be fair. But voters between 18 and 24 years old, the poll found, are about twice as likely as all other age groups to say that they are “not at all confident” that it will.
What’s making Generation Z so disillusioned with the electoral process? Jason Husser, director of the Elon Poll, said he was surprised to see such a large age gap with young voters being distrustful of the process.
It could be a byproduct of growing up in an age of social media and misinformation, he said, or perhaps the explanation is more simple.
“It could also be that older voters have more of a ‘been there, done that’ approach,” he said. “They’ve seen plenty of elections that have been contentious, particularly older voters who were around during the civil rights movement.”
Other questions in the poll offered some clues as to what exactly has young voters concerned.
Young voters, for example, were more likely to express concern that legitimate voters are going to be stopped from voting. They were also more concerned about foreign governments interfering in the election, or that the vote count might not be legitimate.
One notable outlier was on election fraud: People ages 65 and above expressed more concern about that than any other age group.
Here are some examples the poll found. People were asked to rate their confidence level about the following claims:
▪ “Votes will be counted properly” — Overall, 67% of voters said they were very or somewhat confident in this statement. But only 44% of young voters felt the same.
▪ “The election process overall will be fair” — Voters under 25 were the only age group where a majority said they had little to no confidence that this is true.
▪ “How concerned are you about mail-in voting leading to election fraud?” — This was one area where younger voters are more trusting. With 28% of young voters saying they are “very concerned” about mail-in ballots leading to fraud, they’re the least worried of all groups. The most worried were voters age 65 and up, of whom 38% said they were “very concerned.”
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist in Washington, D.C., who has studied youth voter turnout for years, said it makes sense that younger voters would be more concerned about issues like foreign interference, or votes not being counted.
When told of some of the findings in the Elon Poll, Rosenberg called it “a reasonable reaction by people who came of age in an era of Russian interference, deep fakes and the president sabotaging the Post Office. But it also shows a desire to change all of that.”
What young voters say
Younger people historically have skewed to the left, and have also tended not to vote as much as older Americans. But Rosenberg said early voting data from around the country indicates this year could be the biggest ever for youth voter turnout — good for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and not for Republican President Donald Trump.
Rachel Weber, the 26-year-old North Carolina press secretary for the liberal group NextGen America, said turnout is up significantly in North Carolina among voters under 30, many of whom are voting for the first time. That means some people in their twenties who are old enough to have voted in 2016, but didn’t, are choosing to vote this year, she said.
“Young voters, we have lived through a lot of reasons to distrust the system,” she said. “It was just four years ago that the person who won the popular vote didn’t get to go to the White House.”
But not all young voters are liberals. Luke Stancill, a 23-year-old senior at N.C. State University, works with Republican causes. Asked what he thought about young voters being less likely to trust in fair elections, he mentioned the ongoing hearings in Congress where tech CEOs have testified. There, Republican lawmakers questioned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over a decision to temporarily block links to a controversial New York Post article about Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
“It’s just so interesting to me because you have what’s going on with social media ... and Big Tech’s role in all this,” Stancill said.
Stancill said he is also worried about the strain on the election system from all the additional mail-in ballots this year, due to coronavirus — but that he hasn’t seen anything in North Carolina yet to concern him.
“At least from what I’m seeing in North Carolina it’s going to be totally fair,” he said, adding: “I’m more worried about other states than I am about North Carolina.”
Olivia Zalecki, a 23-year-old from Charlotte who now lives in Raleigh, works with North Carolina Asian Americans Together to convince her fellow Gen Z Asian Americans to vote. She voted in 2016 as a 19-year-old and will vote again this year, but said many of her peers feel disenchanted by politics and politicians.
“There are feelings like, ‘Oh my vote won’t matter,’ or ‘None of the candidates represent what I want,’” Zalecki said.
She pushes back, she said, by telling people that if they feel that way, they should vote to try to make a change. And efforts like that might be working: The percentage of Asian American voters who have voted early by this point in the election, she said Wednesday, has nearly doubled since 2016 from 22% to 40%.
What voters of all ages agree on
One thing voters agreed on: They are worried about violence breaking out in the aftermath of the election.
Across all age groups, 75% said they were somewhat or very concerned about violence after the election. Another 17% said they’re a little concerned, and just 8% said it wasn’t a concern at all.
In general, the poll found, most voters say they’ll accept the results of the presidential election — but a strong minority are prepared to reject the results as being invalid.
Just under 64% of voters said they would accept the election results, no matter what. But one in every three people said, “it depends.” A small number, less than 4%, said they’d reject the results no matter what — but that doubled to 8% among young voters.
Husser said he worries what will happen if there is violence or widespread controversy in the wake of this year’s election, and the lasting impact that would have.
“If things do go south after the election, we’re going to have an entire generation or two who don’t trust the electoral process,” he said.
Most people in the poll, regardless of age, also dislike how the United States elects its presidents — despite the fact that North Carolina gets much attention under the Electoral College model due to its status as a large swing state.
A majority of people (51%) said the U.S. should elect its president based on the national popular vote. Another 20% said they weren’t sure, and 29% said we should stick with the Electoral College.
Ella Klein, a 17-year-old from Pfafftown outside of Winston-Salem, is frustrated she can’t vote this year — but said that’s not stopping her from getting involved in politics. She’s volunteering with environmental groups to try to get people to vote for candidates who believe in and are concerned about climate change.
She gets why young people like her might be disillusioned. Many believe, she said, that because the presidency is decided by the Electoral College and not the popular vote, their votes don’t matter as much.
“I think that creates a lot of distrust,” she said. “Once you learn about voting in school and how that works, it’s like, ‘Really? That’s how we do it?’”
This story was originally published October 29, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Young NC voters less likely to trust that the 2020 election will be legitimate."
