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Survey: Elected women outperform men, but a woman is unlikely to beat Trump
People favor an increase in female candidates and some think they often do a better job in office than men — but they are less certain that a woman can defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
That is among several intriguing results of a survey released Thursday by All in Together, a nonpartisan political education nonprofit that urges women to participate in civic life and politics in particular.
The survey of 1,000 registered voters was conducted Aug. 2-9 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
More than half of respondents (58 percent) said that more female candidates has "been a good thing for the country." Also, 42 percent of women and 23 percent of men said that women in elected officials do a better job that men.
Still, while survey participants favored the generic Democratic candidate over Trump in next year's election by a 53 percent to 35 percent margin, the numbers changed when people were asked about the chances of a woman defeating Trump.
In that matchup, Trump had a 9-point advantage.
Other findings in the poll:
- About 70 percent said the country is very politically divided, and women are slightly more optimistic about the coming years — 57 percent believe the United States will be as divided in two to three years, compared to 64 percent of men.
- Two-thirds said Trump's 2016 election has made them more motivated to vote in 2020. Democratic women, at 79 percent, are the most motivated by Trump.
- Nearly half said Trump has made things in Washington worse, with the expected partisan divide of 81 percent of Democrats saying he made things worse, with 61 percent of Republicans saying Trump made things better.
- Three-fourths of Democrats say they are paying more attention to politics since the 2016 election, compared to 53 percent of Republicans.
"The polls point to a mismatch in motivation and action," said Lauren Leader, CEO of All in Together. "Democratic women are highly motivated to beat Trump in 2020 yet focus most of their energy on social media rather than committing to going out and working to help their preferred candidate."
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More states rolling the dice for election security
The paper trail has become the industry standard for giving voters and elections officials confidence that ballots haven't been hacked. Now comes another back-to-the-future move for boosting security and bolstering public confidence in elections: the return of the 10-sided dice.
The quirky toys found in many high school classrooms and role-playing games are part of a pilot program announced this week in Pennsylvania, which is joining a handful of other states in trying out a math-based system for checking the accuracy of election returns.
The "risk-limiting audit" searches for irregularities in vote tallies and relies on some seriously advanced statistical analysis combined with a bit of analog randomness, which is where auditors using those pentagonal trapezohedrons (the dice) at public audit hearings will get involved.
Indiana moving far too slowly to thwart election hacking, lawsuit alleges
Indiana is not moving nearly assertively enough to upgrade its voting machines so they're less vulnerable to hackers, a nonprofit alleges in a federal lawsuit pressing the state to spend millions more before the presidential election.
At issue is the timetable for eliminating the direct recording electronic, or DRE, voting machines that are in use in 58 of the state's 92 counties. The complaint filed Thursday by Indiana Vote by Mail, which advocates for any array of proposals to give Hoosiers easier access to the ballot box, wants to force the state to replace the paperless devices in the next year with machines that produce a voter-verified paper audit trail.
Indiana for now looks to be among just eight states using paperless balloting in 2020, when President Trump will be counting on its 11 electoral votes. The state last went for the Democratic candidate for president in 2008.