A majority of Americans remain confident that their state and local governments will conduct the 2026 midterm elections in a fair and accurate manner — but that trust is waning, according to a new poll released Wednesday.
Two in 3 Americans are confident or very confident the government will run fair and accurate elections in November, per the NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll. The share of Americans losing faith in election administration is increasing, though, with 34 percent of Americans expressing little or no confidence, compared with 24 percent last year.
Americans’ growing distrust comes as the Trump administration has attempted to revive debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and taken sweeping moves to consolidate the federal government’s control over functions typically administered by states.
The FBI seized 2020 voting records from an elections office in Georgia in January and recently subpoenaed documents related to an election audit in Arizona’s largest county. The Justice Department has also sued more than two dozen states in recent months, demanding access to unredacted voter rolls.
President Donald Trump has also repeatedly threatened to “nationalize” elections ahead of the midterms, despite the fact that the Constitution delegates the authority to administer elections to the states.
Democrats have raised alarm that the federal government could interfere with the midterm elections after Trump allies called for military troops and ICE agents to be deployed to polls. Nearly 3 in 4 Republicans in the Marist poll were in favor of the National Guard being present at voting locations, while a similar share of Democrats opposed the idea.
A Department of Homeland Security official told state election officials last month that federal immigration agents won’t be present at voting locations in the fall, but Trump has been noncommittal about ruling out the possibility of deploying military personnel. The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration in federal court Tuesday, asking it to clarify whether or not it had plans to send immigration agents or troops to the polls.
Confidence in fair elections remains high across both Democrats and Republicans, but those who expressed concern about election integrity differed sharply by party in what they cited as their main concern. Democrats are largely concerned that voter suppression will threaten elections, while a majority of Republicans said voter fraud is the biggest threat.
The NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll was conducted by telephone from March 2 to 4, with a sample of 1,591 adults. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.8 percentage points, with a larger margin for certain subgroups.
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