Majority of Americans believe Trump encouraged election interference: poll

More than half of Americans think that the president has personally encouraged foreign nations to interfere in the U.S. election system, according to a new poll.

A survey from NPR released Tuesday found that 51 percent of respondents thought President Trump had encouraged malicious activities related to U.S. elections. A slightly higher number, 56 percent, said that Trump has done not very much or nothing at all to prevent future interference in U.S. elections from occurring.

The poll continues to paint a dire outlook for confidence in U.S. democracy. Less that two-thirds, 62 percent, of respondents now believe that U.S. elections are fundamentally “fair,” according to the poll. Almost 40 percent said that another country would try or succeed in tampering with vote totals in a future U.S. election.

Tech companies also scored low marks in their handling of malicious political disinformation in the poll. Seventy-five percent of Americans do not have confidence in major tech companies when it comes to preventing services such as Facebook and Twitter from preventing election interference from occurring on their platforms.

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans polled said that it is difficult to identify true information from misleading information, and 55 percent say it will be harder to identify misleading information during the 2020 election than it was in 2016, according to NPR.

The poll, conducted between Jan. 7-12, surveyed 1,259 U.S. adults with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.