Enfield Town Clerk Marissa Ignacio says no one has come to her worried about voter fraud.
“Nope, I haven’t had any of that,” Ignacio said. She started in July and said she can’t speak to earlier years.
While Enfield’s clerk says voters haven’t raised concerns, Washington continues to pay attention to New Hampshire. The U.S. Justice Department sued the state last year for its full, unredacted voter registration list, saying it wanted to check whether New Hampshire keeps its voter rolls clean. U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante dismissed the case in June.
Laplante wrote that the department’s demand letter didn’t point to any problems with the state’s voter data or any complaints. The lawsuit offered one fact: New Hampshire had identified or removed fewer duplicate registrations than the national average. That alone, Laplante wrote, wasn’t enough to justify handing over the list. The department has appealed. In July, DOJ also warned state election officials that it is a crime to intentionally allow ineligible people to vote.
A Dartmouth researcher who studies how much Americans trust their elections says the evidence doesn’t support the worry. John Carey, a government professor and the college’s interim dean of faculty, co-directs Bright Line Watch, a research project that surveys political scientists and the public. Carey said a growing share of Americans doubt their elections are honest, and “there really is not any concrete evidence to support that claim.”
“We can’t say for certain how much fraud there is, but I can say with a lot of confidence that it is exceedingly rare in our elections,” Carey said. “All the ways that we have to investigate fraud are consistent with that.”
Bright Line Watch surveys both political scientists and a representative sample of Americans about four times a year. Carey started it with Dartmouth government professor Brendan Nyhan and two colleagues at other universities after the 2016 election.
Carey said the 2016 campaign brought something new to American politics: “Trump 2016 expressing doubts about the security of American elections and the integrity of our election process.”
“I’ve spent most of my career studying Latin American politics,” Carey said. “I’ve seen and heard all this a lot of times before, but in the context of U.S. politics, I’d never seen it.”
“The unfounded allegations of fraud are, I think, a bigger threat to our democracy and to our elections,” he said.
What the numbers show
Bright Line Watch’s most recent survey, released Wednesday, found that confidence in the vote count has risen since July among both Democrats and Republicans. Seventy-three percent of Democrats and 67% of Republicans said they were confident votes nationwide will be counted as voters intend. Among political scientists, it was 85%.
But beliefs about fraud split sharply by party. Between 52% and 67% of Republicans said they expect at least a few thousand cases of each type of fraud the survey asked about, such as noncitizens voting or ballots being tampered with. Among Democrats, it was 10% to 19%. Among political scientists, it was 5% to 10%.
“When large percentages of any population stop having confidence in the integrity of their elections, then you’re likely to have people not respecting the outcome,” he said.
The experts surveyed do have worries heading into the midterms, Carey said. At the top of their list: the possible seizure of ballot boxes in some places, and National Guard or military personnel showing up near polling places. Concerns such as noncitizen voting, mail ballot fraud and tampering with voting machines ranked much lower.
Republican voters, Carey said, worry most about noncitizens voting and about the integrity of the count after ballots are cast. Democrats worry more about whether every eligible voter will be able to cast a ballot, and about military, National Guard or immigration agents at the polls.
U.S. District Judge Samantha Elliott ruled in May that part of the state’s proof-of-citizenship law was unconstitutional. Based on a political scientist’s trial testimony, she found 47 instances of wrongful voting in New Hampshire from 1998 to 2024, including in local elections. Voters cast roughly 8.3 million votes in general elections during that period. The state agreed at trial that voter fraud here is extremely small, the ruling says.
Closer to home
One finding has held steady for the decade Bright Line Watch has been running: people trust the elections closest to them.
“People tend to be more distrustful of people that are farther away from them, from their own direct experience,” Carey said. “Whenever I go to the polls, I’m always really impressed with the volunteers working there, the safeguards that are in place.”
In Enfield, Ignacio said, absentee ballots are kept in a locked vault in the town clerk’s office until Election Day, when they are opened in front of the moderator and the public. The town counts ballots by machine, she said. The machine is not connected to the internet and is tested ahead of time with actual ballots.
First-time voters registering in Enfield on Nov. 3 need to bring proof of citizenship, such as a U.S. passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers, along with a driver’s license and proof of residency, according to Ignacio. She did not mention the option of a sworn affidavit, which a federal judge ruled in May could not be eliminated by the state.
She said the town has had no trouble finding poll workers.
Enfield police are “always on call,” she said, “and they’re stopping in, checking in, making sure things are going well.”
Ignacio said residents with questions about how the election is run should talk to the town moderator.
After the vote
Carey said Bright Line Watch will survey again after the election, and he expects confidence to diverge by party depending on who wins.
The most important thing leaders can do to keep public faith in elections, he said, is to concede promptly when they lose. After the 2022 midterms, Bright Line Watch studied statewide races across the country and found that refusals to concede were rare.
“Every election’s got losers,” Carey said. “Losers need to be able to accept the results when they’re fairly arrived at, and fight the elections another day, in two years or four years.”
