Poll: Voter Fraud Paranoia Officially Bipartisan

When it comes to passing laws that make it harder for specific constituencies to vote, Republicans have a near-monopoly. As we’ve detailed extensively, the last 12 months has seen a flood of voter I.D. legislation, almost all of it geared at combatting the non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud (you have a greater chance of seeing a UFO).

But paranoia about voter fraud, it turns out, is a truly bipartisan affliction. Public Policy Polling, which apart from being a reliable pollster in its own right has a knack for asking large samples of voters totally random questions we were always curious about, asked voters in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio whether they were concerned about voter fraud this November. Here’s Florida:

Public Policy PollingPublic Policy Polling

And here’s what happens when you ask about Republicans. The roles are mostly reversed, except interestingly self-identified moderates seem less worried about Democratic voting fraud than actual liberals:

Public Policy PollingPublic Policy Polling

Those trends hold for Ohio and North Carolina too. The takeaway from all of this, as ever, is that we’re all slowly going insane.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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