Voters think Texas election results are accurate — but many question U.S. results, poll finds

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A large majority of Texas voters think the state’s official election results are just fine, but 30% think national election results are “very inaccurate,” according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

While 78% of registered voters said the Texas results were either “very” or “somewhat” accurate, only 52% said the same thing about the official election results in the U.S. While 89% of Democratic voters said the U.S. results are accurate, 73% of Republican voters beg to differ, including a majority — 52% — who characterized the counting as “very inaccurate.”

“That’s basically, ‘Trump won,’” said Daron Shaw, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the poll. “These people thought the election was stolen, and Texas Republicans talking about elections are playing to that base.”

That helps explain why Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, included “election integrity” on his list of high priorities for the current legislative session, though there is no evidence of widespread election fraud in Texas.

The Texas results, on the other hand, won approval across the board, with 88% of Democrats, 76% of Republicans and 57% of independents saying those counts were accurate.

The vast majority of respondents — 86% — said voting in Texas elections is easy. That includes 90% of white voters, 78% of Black voters and 82% of Hispanic voters. Of the 9% who found voting difficult, the most often cited problems were long lines (13%), voting by mail (8%) and limited polling places (7%).

In spite of that, only 40% of voters would leave the state’s election laws alone. Another 27% would make them stricter and 25% would make them less strict. The partisan lines are evident in those numbers: 46% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats would make the laws stricter; 5% of Republicans and 50% of Democrats would make election laws less strict.

“A plurality wants to leave the laws alone,” said Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin. “And there is not much distrust of the Texas system.”

The University of Texas/Texas Tribune internet survey of 1,200 registered voters was conducted from Feb. 12-18 and has an overall margin of error of +/- 2.83 percentage points. Numbers in charts might not add up to 100% because of rounding.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.