Less than half of North Carolina voters said they have confidence that the national vote count will be fair and accurate in the 2024 election, as found by a poll conducted by Elon Poll in partnership with The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer and The Durham Herald-Sun. This is a major decrease from the 2020 poll, where 69% of voters were confident in the election process. 

Jason Husser, director of the Elon Poll, said the lack of confidence in the integrity of elections is a new phenomenon.

“We're at a moment in American history that is quite challenging,” Husser told Elon News Network. “We have a sort of historical outlier pattern in which we're a highly divided time where people are very suspicious of institutions and formal processes, and that's being reflected in this data about people's concerns about election accuracy.”

The poll was fielded by YouGov, an international marketing and polling firm, who interviewed 1,095 registered North Carolina voters and reduced the sample to 800. The survey was conducted Aug. 2 to 9 — after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket just before the Democratic National Convention. 

This is the first of four total polls the organization is planning for this election season — three before the election and one after. Elon Poll has been operating for 24 years now, according to Husser. Over the years of operation, the method for polling has changed from calling to email.

“We're recruiting people through various networks and fairly complex means of trying to get a group of voters that end up looking like the state as a whole, in terms of a number of different demographic characteristics,” Husser said.

Husser said polling is extremely important for voters and candidates alike. 

“Elections don't really tell you what people want in terms of various issues and what they really want in terms of their elected leaders to do,” Husser said. “What polls do is give voters, as well as politicians, reliable data, depending on what you talk about. What do people want on the very many different decisions that those elected officials are going to be making?”

Husser said Elon Poll asks similar questions over the years to compare different statistics over time. The questions come from different events on the news and social media. 

“We take a look at various social media conversations, what are people talking about in terms of the election?” Husser said. “We get a sense of what are the issues that are being talked about by politicians, and then we try to come up with a set of questions that contribute to those conversations, where we can be a part of people's conversations, not imposing conversations on people.”

National

Not only are North Carolina voters concerned about the integrity of the election, 73% of voters said they are very or somewhat concerned about political violence after the election or around the inauguration. This is just under the 74% reported in 2020. 

The Elon Poll also found that former President Donald Trump and Harris are very close in the polls — 46% for Trump and 44% for Harris. 

Around 67% of voters said the Biden administration is responsible for the current state of the economy. 

State

For the governor race, voters think more favorably of Democrat Josh Stein — 44% — than Republican Mark Robinson — 30%.


The state’s economy is an extremely or very important issue to 90% of voters, and 78% of voters said inflation has negatively impacted their family in the past six months. 

The poll also found that around 44% of voters said North Carolina should decrease restrictions on abortion that were passed in 2023.