RESOURCES:
Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP)
TRANSCRIPTION:
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU. I'm Caroline MacGregor, and today my guest is Stephanie Leiser. She is the Director of the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at U of M's Ford School of Public Policy. First of all, Stephanie, welcome!
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: Thank you so much for having me!
Caroline MacGregor: So, you're here with us today to talk about election integrity, so to speak. There's been a survey conducted by the University of Michigan. This has been conducted this year, I believe. Tell me about the survey and when it was conducted, if you would.
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: Yes. This year's survey was conducted between the end of March and early June. So, we are asking local officials in every single city, village, township, and county in Michigan. There's 1,856 of them, and we ask them about, among other topics, election security. So, this is a survey that we run every year, sometimes more than once a year. And we have touched on this topic of election security in the past, and we wanted to do so again, given the upcoming elections this year.
Caroline MacGregor: According to this survey, Michigan officials continue to maintain high confidence in election security and accuracy over the past years. This despite, though, President Trump's attempts to overturn his 2020 election. Tell me how you reached some of your findings, and we can touch on some individual points if you could.
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: Sure. The most important finding is that, this year and consistent with prior years, we find that 92% of local governments in Michigan report being very confident in their ability to administer elections that are accurate and fair, et cetera. Only 1% report any kind of doubt about not being very competent or they report that they don't know. So, this is about as high of a rating as you can get when it comes to survey research. And this has been consistent over a number of years when we've asked this question before. The lowest rating we ever got was 87% said they were very confident in 2020. Of course this was Spring 2020 when we were asking them, when we we're all sort of dealing with what was going to happen with COVID and how everything was going work. So, it's not surprising that the rating went down a little bit during then, but since this rating is been consistently very high.
Caroline MacGregor: And as you know, we continue to get some federal and state claims, or at least some questioning about possible vulnerabilities in Michigan's elections. But yet again, there isn't really proof of interference. But tell me how you went about gathering information for this survey.
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: So, like I said, we conduct this survey regularly, and we are asking local officials in Michigan, so these are like city managers and mayors and, in the case of elections, we're talking to the clerk. So, it is their job to actually administer the elections. And so, we feel that they're kind of the most authoritative source on how well-prepared they're feeling, what sort of worries they have, how prepared they feel and what they're concerned about going into an election cycle. And so, we have surveyed them. We get a very high response rate. This year, it was 72%, so that means that we're getting a really good sense across the state, all the different regions and different types of communities of different sizes, urban, rural, just how local officials are feeling about going into this election cycle. Like I said, we got this very high confidence rating, kind of across the board type of a finding. So, we have the ability to break down our findings by small communities versus large and urban versus rural. And this is something that we really see across the board is this high levels of confidence.
Caroline MacGregor: What about some claims that non-citizens are voting in Michigan's elections? This is rare, but some election activists have pointed out that there are instances where it has occurred.
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: We do not directly ask them to assess or estimate the risk of those very specific types of things happening, just because, even when we hear them in the news, these are quite isolated circumstance. So, it doesn't really make sense to us from a survey perspective to kind of see what if we could get a statewide reading on who's worried about that, because we think the percentages would just be barely even register on the charts. So, we do ask them about types of things they are worried about and what are some of the main challenges they have on their mind going into this election cycle. And, really, the top three things that clerks are worried about, number one, is the cost. It's not surprising local governments always worried about the cost of doing things. But this year, about 50%--almost 50%--of governments worry about just the cost actually running the election, of staffing it, of making sure that they have the right equipment and getting everything updated and done in a timely manner. And it's not that they're worried, like the high cost is gonna affect the accuracy, but it will affect the timeliness of the results. And so, I think that's something that's on a lot of clerks' minds. About 27% are worried about being able to find enough poll workers from within their community to actually be able to staff polling locations and make sure lines don't get too long and everybody gets their questions answered. And then, another thing that has really been persistent, especially in the past few years, is worries about disinformation for voters. Are voters getting the right information about when are polls open and what do they need to do and what if they have an absentee ballot? And then, to a lesser extent, actual disturbances at polling locations, so those are the types of things that our clerks are really worried about this year.
Caroline MacGregor: Back to the issue of absentee and early in-person voting, what did you find in this area? Has this grown in popularity? And are there particular ages that we see this more?
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: From the clerk's perspective, they're the ones administering this. And like I said, their number one concern is just cost. So, everything that we can do to have early voting and make voting more accessible, those actually just put more costs on the clerk. So, that's why they're so concerned about making sure they have enough resources to be able to expand voting accessibility and making sure that they're able to process everything and do everything in a timely way.
Caroline MacGregor: Did you get any feedback on equipment malfunctions?
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: We do have a specific question about to what extent are you worried about election equipment failure or malfunctions. This year, it was about 8% of clerks who reported that they were at least somewhat worried about that, so that's not a insignificant percentage.
Caroline MacGregor: That is quite high.
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: Mm hmm. And so, I mean, to be clear, like I said before, it's not necessarily a worry about the accuracy of counting ballots, but the timeliness. So, when there is an equipment malfunction, often they have to switch over to doing manual processing, which takes a lot longer.
Caroline MacGregor: Obviously, this survey was conducted across the state in small and large municipalities, both deep red, deep blue. But while you're hearing this feedback from those who administer the elections, township officials, et cetera, there's obviously been a lot of negative feedback about election integrity over the last few years.
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: Yes.
Caroline MacGregor: There's been a lot of studies that show they're still concerned no matter what township officials say.
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: So, one thing I can point to there is, yes, our survey is of township officials and local officials, but we ask them their perception of how their residents are feeling. So, we ask them, "Do you think your residents are feeling confident in your ability to administer an accurate election?" And that has something that has actually ticked up this year. So, this year, it was about two-thirds think their residents are very confident in the fairness and accuracy of the election, and our last reading on that from 2022 was 52%. So, we see this as a good sign that, at the local level, local officials are reporting that they're feeling better about their relationship with residents and the mutual trust there. So, we don't know exactly what's driving that increasing trust, but it is a good sign overall. I think one thing that really we have working for us in Michigan is just how decentralized it is. And it's quite decentralized across the United States, but Michigan is actually the most decentralized in the whole country in that number of different little townships' officials and just how localized voting actually is. And so, we see this as when you have these kind of big picture concerns, like it's a strength to know that, "Okay, this is my small community." The clerk, probably somebody you know, especially if you're in a small town, you know that they have integrity and have the ability to administer the election and also just to know that to do any kind of widespread manipulation or interference in voting would just require an extraordinarily coordinated effort across a lot of small townships and jurisdictions that it seems quite impractical to think that would be real a threat on a wide scale. Of course, there's always the risk of sort of isolated incidents here and there, but I think a widespread risk is probably quite low. We're going back to the same local officials and saying, "How are you feeling about elections this year?" And so, we want the data. We want these reports to be helpful in that sense of tracking things over time and really helping the debate and really informing the process, rather than just being kind of a snapshot of, "What's the vibe check? What are people feeling right now?"
Caroline MacGregor: Did you find that there was some feedback about bigger areas versus smaller townships as far as election integrity overall?
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: We did not find the level of confidence of the clerks and those administering an election. We did not find that that varied by how large or small or how urban or rural or even partisanship. Everyone across the board reported that same high level of competence, but it's in the things that they're worried about. What are they worried about going into this election? What are they keeping their eyes on? That's the thing that really popped out at us is that the larger jurisdictions are the ones who are really worried about disinformation and possible disturbances at polling locations.
Caroline MacGregor: I've been speaking with Stephanie Leiser. She is the Director of the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at U of M's Ford School of Public Policy. And we've been talking about election integrity and a survey from the University of Michigan. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us today!
Dr. Stephanie Leiser: It's an honor to be with you!
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU Ypsilanti.
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