How Trustworthy Are American Elections? Elliot Ackerman Joins the Discussion on Restoring Faith in The Electoral Process

Next week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer plans to send a new voting rights bill to the Senate Floor. It is the latest attempt to “fix” the American electoral process, and it raises questions about what is exactly wrong, what can be done to improve faith in election results, and who wins and who loses from changing the way we vote. One thing we do know is that a lot of Americans don’t trust election results. A Gallup poll from 2020 shows that only forty percent of Americans say they are confident in the honesty of US elections. Only one-third of Republican voters believe that the 2020 presidential election was “free and fair,” and after the 2016 contest, 28 percent of Democrats expressed skepticism that the votes had been counted accurately. So how bad is it? Are elections truly untrustworthy or is this a perception problem borne of political opportunism – where if you don’t like the results, you attack the referee? RealClearPolitics co-founder and president Tom Bevan, senior elections analyst Sean Trende, and Elliot Ackerman, author of “2034: A Novel of the Next Word War,” co-written with Admiral James Stavridis, join Andrew Walworth on today’s RealClearPolitics Takeaway podcast.