The Pew Research Center has developed a nice time series of questions about the election process in their biennial post election polls.  The most recent report was posted last Friday, and may be reviewed here.

I’m most interested in Section 3, which zeroes in on the voting process, including confidence in the vote count.  Among other things they report results of the question about whether respondents were confident their own vote was counted accurately, and whether they were confident that votes nationwide were accurately counted.  The “votes across the country” answer (what Mike Sances and I refer to in a paper as “sociotropic confidence”) fell from 43% in 2008 to 31% in 2012.

The full report notes that among Obama voters, the fraction that were “very confident” votes across the country were accurately counted fell from 56% to 42% from 2008 to 2012, while also falling among McCain/Romney voters from 29% to 21%.  The good news, if there is any, is that the partisan gap in the confidence measure has fallen from 27 points in 2008 to 21 point in 2012.  Of course, the fact the gap fell is due to many Democratic voters losing faith in the quality of election administration nationwide in 2012, following the Republican voters’ loss of faith in 2008.

I can hardly wait for the raw data to become available.