All eyes of the world will be on Pennsylvania on November 5 with the battleground state potentially deciding who will win the 2024 election.
DailyMail.com’s recent poll in the state has Donald Trump and Kamala Harris tied at 47 percent, meaning the eventual winner will likely be decided by a razor-thin margin.
In 2020, it took four days to finish counting the results of the Keystone State and secure Joe Biden with victory.
The commonwealth is critical for both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris want the keys to the White House, and a critical question for voters is: Will the election be fair?
According to our new poll, most Pennsylvanians are confident the integrity of their count will remain intact. But some Trump voters are skeptical.
Seventy-one percent of voters agreed that the election in the commonwealth would be ‘run in a fair and secure way’, according to a new Daily Mail/J.L. Partners poll.
Just 20 percent all likely voters in the poll of Pennsylvania said the election would not be run in a free or fair way. Only nine percent said they did not know.
The poll of 800 likely voters was conducted between October 5-8.
Thirty-five percent of Pennsylvania voters who plan to vote for Trump in 2024 believe that the elections will not be secure and fair, while 53 percent of them signaled trust in the system. Twelve percent said they did not know.
The same number of those who voted for the former president in 2020 also feel there is a risk of fraud.
Former President Donald Trump has urged his supporters to ‘swamp the vote’ to prevent any kind of election cheating.
‘You got to get your friends and vote because, you know, they play a lot of tricks this particular other side,’ Trump told his supporters at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania earlier this month urging them to help him run up the score.
‘We can’t let it happen. We can’t let it happen again,’ he said.
Trump vocally protested the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania, claiming that Democrats had weaponized the mail-in ballot system to cheat. The Trump campaign unsuccessfully tried to challenge the election results in Pennsylvania claiming irregularities with mail-in ballots.
‘If the election does not go Trump’s way – or the margins are razor-thin – the ingredients are all there for a toxic election process that could cast doubt on the result,’ said James Johnson, cofounder JL.Partners to DailyMail.com about the survey’s findings.
Johnson said the Daily Mail model showed a 30 percent change of a recount in at least one state.
‘That is not negligible and suggests drama is on the way,’ he concluded.
Dave Westrom, 62, spoke about the election with DailyMail.com while waiting for Trump to appear for a town hall at Oaks, Pennsylvania.
‘I think there’s only one issue in this election, and that’s going to be if it’s rigged or not,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think Republicans are very smart, and I don’t think they’ve done near enough to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen.’
Westrom wore a T-shirt that read ‘I need new conspiracy theories. My old ones came true.’ He said he was skeptical of election polls indicating that it would be a close election.
‘I don’t believe the polls right now, because I think they’re trying to convince everyone that’s real close, so that when the election happens, they can do what they did in 2020,’ he said.
Harris supporters appear more trusting of the election system as the poll showed that just six percent said they did not trust their election system and six percent did not know. Eighty-seven percent of Harris supporters signaled trust in the existing system.
Pennsylvania is considered the top prize for the presidential campaigns as its 19 electoral college votes will help either candidate win handily.
The voting laws in Pennsylvania remain mostly unchanged from 2020, as divided state legislatures could not agree to any substantial election law reforms.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused in early October to issue a decision on two different rules for mail ballots, as the ACLU tried to challenge a rule requiring ballots to be dated properly in order to count.
‘This Court will neither impose nor countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election,’ the court order said.
The court also refused to rule on a practice of some counties notifying voters if their ballot had a mistake on it, requiring it to be corrected in order to count.