Americans Report Being Happy With Midterm Voting

(CN) – A little more than half of the voting-eligible population in the U.S. cast ballots in November’s midterm elections and an overwhelming majority of those people say their voting experience was hassle-free, the Pew Research Center reported Monday.

Seventy-six percent of people who say they voted in the 2018 midterms describe the experience as “very easy,” according to a Pew survey conducted last month of more than 10,600 Americans.

In a poll conducted in October, only 44 percent of those who planned to vote expected that the process would be easy, according to researchers.  

But in the more recent poll, most voters reported that their polling places were not very crowded and that they did not have to wait in line longer than 10 minutes to vote. Nearly half of those who voted in person said they did not have to wait in line to cast their ballots, while 33 percent said they did not have to wait longer than 10 minutes.

Hispanic and black voters are more likely than white voters to report wait times longer than 10 minutes.

Twenty percent of Hispanic voters and 18 percent of black voters say they had to wait more than 10 but less than 30 minutes to vote, and 9 percent of both demographics say they had to wait more than 30 minutes to vote.

By comparison, 13 percent of white voters reported that they had to wait in lines longer than 10 but less than 30 minutes, and only 5 percent said they had to wait in lines longer than 30 minutes.

Voters in the South reported longer wait times than those in other regions of the country. Eight percent of southern voters said they waited in line for more than 30 minutes, compared to 4 percent in the Northeast and Midwest and 5 percent in the West.

Voters also have good things to say about their local election workers – 68 percent of survey respondents said poll workers in their community did their jobs “very well.”

Only 23 percent said election workers across the country did their jobs “very well,” but 57 percent said poll workers did their job “at least somewhat well.”

Americans overall are more confident in the security of the country’s election systems now than they were before the midterms, when only 45 percent expressed confidence in their security.

Now, 64 percent of Americans say they are confident in the security of the country’selections, and 77 percent say they are “very or somewhat confident” that the systems are secure from hacking and other technological threats.

Confidence in the security of the nation’s election systems is up particularly among Democrats. While 34 percent of Democrats reported they were at least “somewhat confident” in the systems a month before the election, 60 percent reported confidence after the election.

Among those who did not vote in the midterms, 61 percent say they wish they had done so.

They cited various reasons for not voting, including apathy about the candidates in their area and thinking that their vote would not make a difference.

Forty-nine percent of non-voters said they did not vote because they don’t “like politics.”

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