Examining false beliefs about voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election

Key claims

• Widespread false beliefs among Trump voters: A majority of Trump voters (>77%) believed voting is prone to fraud, 78% believed mail-in voting is prone to fraud, and 65% believed Trump won the election despite no evidence of systemic election fraud.
• Polarized legitimacy perceptions: Only 22% of Trump voters agreed that Biden was legitimately elected; however, 38% said they would accept Biden's legitimacy if Trump lost his legal challenges or conceded, leaving a resistant 40% who would not accept his legitimacy in either scenario.
• Partisan knowledge paradox: Among Trump voters, higher political knowledge and closer attention to election news were associated with increased belief in voter fraud and a Trump victory—the opposite pattern observed among Biden voters.
• Analytic thinking protects accuracy: Cognitive reflection (capacity for analytic thinking) was associated with reduced belief that Trump won among both Trump and Biden voters, suggesting reasoning ability mitigates partisan false beliefs.
• Low endorsement of violence despite discord: Levels of partisan spite and endorsement of political violence were equivalent between Trump and Biden voters and relatively low overall; most Trump voters (88%) indicated they would not protest if Trump failed to concede.

Sources cited in the article

The article references prior work on:

• Misinformation during the 2020 election (Lytvynenko & Silverman, Zadrozny, Trump's false claims documented by fact-checkers)
• Definitions of misinformation (Wardle's information disorder framework)
• Cognitive reflection and political polarization (Kahan et al. on motivated reasoning; Pennycook & Rand on the relationship between cognitive sophistication and accuracy)
• Partisan behavior and belief in election fraud (Edelson et al. on conspiratorial thinking)

Notes

This research note is significant for documenting the scale and persistence of false election-fraud beliefs immediately after the 2020 election, providing quantitative baseline data for understanding election-related misinformation. The finding that political knowledge correlates with more false beliefs among Trump voters is particularly notable, challenging the assumption that more information uniformly improves accuracy—a key distinction from prior findings about political sophistication and polarization. The sample has limitations (quota-matched rather than probability sampling; small Trump voter sample relative to Biden voters), and responses on sensitive topics like political violence may understate true preferences due to social desirability bias. The authors appropriately note that the study does not establish whether false beliefs were caused by misinformation versus being a feature of partisan polarization more broadly. The open-access publication and publicly available data (via OSF) support replication and extension of the findings.