Around 70 percent of US voters believe their votes will be cast and counted accurately in tomorrow’s congressional midterm elections, Gallup revealed in a poll on Monday.
28 percent of respondents said they are “very” confident in the accuracy of the midterm vote while 42 percent polled said they were “somewhat” confident. The historical average of voters’ confidence in election accuracy is 68 percent, according to Gallup.
The pollster pointed out that even though claims of voter fraud are common the actual documented cases are rare.
The poll results come despite reports of election system hacking and voter suppression. On Sunday, US state of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican gubernatorial nominee, accused rival Democrats of hacking the state’s election systems and said the government is opening a probe into the matter.
Kemp is running against Democrat Stacey Abrams who could become the state’s first black governor. The Democratic Party has accused Kemp of purging minorities off voter registration lists. A federal judge last week prevented Kemp from throwing out some 3,000 early voting ballots from mainly minority residents the state wrongly tagged as non-citizens.
US voters head to the polls for midterm elections on Tuesday to cast ballots to fill 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and one-third of the 100-member Senate along with other local offices. The outcome of the 2018 midterms will determine if the Republican Party will maintain control of both chambers of Congress. Many pollsters are predicting that the Democrats may be poised to recapture the House, a development that would divide the US legislative branch.