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ABSTRACT
Does the way journalists report on electoral fraud affect Americans’ support for voter ID laws? Drawing on an original survey experiment, we show that exposure to reporting on voter fraud that contains weight-of-evidence information and factual corrections reduces support for voter ID laws. The results of a causal mediation analysis show that this effect is mediated by beliefs about the severity of voter fraud. Further, we find that news source attribution does not moderate this effect.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Data used in this study from an existing data set (Jenkins and Gomez Citation2022).
2 Existing research indicates that voter fraud in US elections is very rare and unlikely to affect election outcomes (Bump Citation2014; Levitt Citation2007, Citation2014; Minnite Citation2010).
3 Fox and CNN are chosen as the source attributions because they are the primary news sources for Republicans and Democrats (Pew Research Center 2014).
4 We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possibility.