Elections 2024

A nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning site researches the claims of politicians and checks their accuracy.

Vote Smart provides free, factual, unbiased information on candidates and elected officials to all Americans.

270toWin is independent, not financed or owned by any political party, industry group or lobbyist. We aggregate polls and professional election projections, complementing that with relevant news and original content.

Polling data from Real Clear Politics. RCP’s editorial curation and original reporting present balanced, non-partisan analysis.

Electoral disinformation is feared to variously undermine democratic trust by inflaming incorrect negative beliefs about the fairness of elections, or to shore up dictators by creating falsely positive ones. Recent studies of political misperceptions, however, suggest that disinformation has at best minimal effects on beliefs. In this article, we investigate the drivers of public perceptions and misperceptions of election fairness. We link public opinion data from 82 national elections with expert survey data on disinformation and de facto electoral integrity. We show that, overall, people arrive at largely accurate perceptions, but that disinformation campaigns are indeed associated with less accurate and more polarized beliefs about election fairness.

The 2020 election was both a miracle and a tragedy. In the midst of a pandemic posing unprecedented challenges, local and state administrators pulled off a safe, secure, and professional election. This article discusses metrics of success in the adaptations that took place—record-high turnout, widespread voter satisfaction, a doubling of mail voting without a concomitant increase in problems often associated with absentee ballots, and the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of new poll workers. However, a competing narrative of a "stolen election" led to a historically deep chasm between partisans in their trust of the election process and outcome.

This study integrates research on negativity bias and misinformation, as a comparison of how systematic (negativity) and incidental (misinformation) challenges to the news are perceived differently by audiences. Through a cross-country survey, we found that both challenges are perceived as highly salient and disruptive. Despite negativity bias in the news possibly being a more widespread phenomenon, respondents across the surveyed countries perceive misinformation as a relatively bigger threat, even in countries where negativity is estimated to be more prevalent. In conclusion, the optimism of recent research about people’s limited misinformation exposure does not seem to be reflected in audiences’ threat perceptions.