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Saturday, May 9, 2026

SF Bay Area voters don't buy illegal voting conspiracies | Politics - San Francisco Examiner

Amid overwhelming evidence illegal voting is rare, not nearly pervasive enough to sway elections and persistent false claims to the contrary, fewer Bay Area voters identify it as a threat to American democracy than their statewide peers in a new poll.

The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Poll asked registered voters a number of questions late last month about the state of U.S. democracy, including the potential dangers it faces, ahead of Tuesday's midterm elections.

Asked whether "people voting or casting ballots illegally in elections" poses a major threat, a minor threat or no threat at all to American democracy, 48% of registered Bay Area voters identified voter fraud as no threat. That was at least nine percentage points higher than every region of the state, including Los Angeles, where 34% of voters said the same.

Forty-eight percent of registered voters in the Bay Area's nine counties identified illegal voting as a threat of some kind to democracy in the U.S. Twenty-nine percent said it was a major threat, while 19% said it was a minor one.

"Some vague feelings that voter fraud is a problem are not unusual," Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University who specializes in voting behavior and urban politics, told The Examiner in an interview on Monday.

"When asked this, this is one of those questions where they're like, 'I don't know. It sounds like a bad thing. Well, I'll say 'minor threat,' " he added.

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