"The Damage of Trump's Voter-Fraud Allegations Can't Be Undone" in The Atlantic's Ideas section examines how the unfounded claims of fraud from Trump and his allies significantly undermine faith in the American election system, especially among voters who support him. Worse, the damage seems to be resistant to repair by fact-checking.
"It may be that confidence in the election system is a soft target," Brendan Nyhan, a political-science professor at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the new paper, told me. "It's complicated, hard to observe, unintuitive, and relies on trust. Trust in institutions seems to be easier to destroy than to build."
To test the effect of statements such as Trump's, an interdisciplinary team of researchers showed research subjects statements from Trump and other GOP politicians and commentators alleging fraud in elections, either in small or great amounts. The results were distressing, if not altogether surprising: Republicans, as well as independents, saw their faith in the election system decrease. (Views among Democrats did not meaningfully change.) The effect was especially pronounced when subjects were split between approving or disapproving of Trump.
"In modern American political history, we've never had a major-party presidential nominee allege that the election was stolen from them, let alone an incumbent who has to leave office," Nyhan said. "The conversation has focused too much on the 'Will Trump step down?' question. I'm much more worried about the damage to institutional legitimacy that he can do on the way out."
Read the complete article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/election-confidence-fraud/612358/