"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands

In 1959, the Gallup Poll asked "In your opinion, do you think there may be dishonesty in the voting or counting of votes in your district?"  They repeated that question in 1964 (as I once said, it's interesting that they didn't repeat it in late 1960, since that election was very close and there were allegations that voter fraud had made the difference).  That's the only question on voter fraud I can find until the 21st century.  Although the recent questions have been worded differently, I think that they are similar enough to make a comparison useful, so I give it below.  The first column is pessimistic responses--agree that there may be dishonesty or not confident (combining not too and not at all) that votes will be accurately cast and counted.    

 "In your opinion, do you think there may be dishonesty in the voting or counting of votes in your district?"

April 1959    13%    71%
March 1964  13%    69%

"How confident are you that, ______ , the votes will be accurately cast and counted in this [or next] year’s election?"

                    where you vote                     across the country
Oct 2006         8%      91%                                 25%      75%
Nov 2007      12%      88%                                 30%      71%
Aug  2016     16%      81%                                 36%      62%
Oct   2016     14%      84%                                 33%      66%
Sept 2020      21%      79%                                 41%      59%

In 2006-7, negative responses for "where you vote" were below the level of negative responses for "your district" in 1959-64.  In 2016, they were a little higher, and in September 2020, they were clearly higher.  In 1959 and 1964, there were a substantial number of don't know answers--in the 21st century, very few.   I don't think that's specific to this issue--there seems to have been a general decline in don't know answers over the years.  On this question, I'd regard don't know as closer to an optimistic answer--that is, saying that you don't know of any reason to think so.   But if you count some of the don't knows as pessimistic answer, that just reinforces the point that pessimistic answers were more common in 1959 and 1964 than in the early 2000s.  

In the 21st century, they also asked about "across the country" (the different questions were given to random halves of the sample).  Pessimistic answers were consistently higher, but they followed the same course of change over time.  

This is related to the issues I discussed in my last post.  General trust in people and confidence in institutions, especially political institutions, has been declining for a long time.  To the extent that views of elections reflect general trust, you would expect them to be more negative in the early 2000s than in the 1950s and 1960s.  But they weren't, and may even have been more positive.  I've mentioned a question asked in a Washington Post survey shortly after the Supreme Court ruling gave George Bush the victory in 2000:  "Whatever its faults, the United States still has the best system of government in the world":   89% agreed, including 85% of Gore supporters.  That is, a general loss of confidence in institutions didn't lead to a loss of confidence in elections, because politicians and journalists kept up a tradition of not just accepting the results, but celebrating our electoral system and history after an election.  It wasn't until Trump broke from that tradition that public confidence fell.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]