Americans overwhelmingly support pro-voting policies, national survey finds

By Natalie Hausmann

A collage of voting reform-related images including court pillars, a U.S. Senate podium, a voting sticker that says "I REGISTERED AND VOTED TODAY", a stopwatch, a "VOTE HERE" sign, the first page of H.R. 1, the U.S. Capitol, a small spiral flip notebook with the words "ELECTION DAY OFF" circled, and a hand writing on a piece of graph paper displaying an American-flag-shaped bar graph

There’s broad, bipartisan support for reforms that increase voting access, a survey released Friday revealed.

The iVote Research survey, which polled 800 likely midterm voters, found that 82% of Americans strongly favor early in-person voting options and making Election Day a federal holiday. Nine in 10 voters said they support training and hiring more poll workers to increase polling place hours.

Meanwhile, 75% said they support more drop boxes for mail ballots and increased resources for the U.S. Postal Service. President Donald Trump has significantly reduced funding for the USPS since taking office.

What’s more, nine in 10 Americans polled oppose restrictive measures, including cutting voting hours or the number of polling locations. 

That’s consistent with what voters have said in places like North Carolina and Texas, where there’s been significant outrage after the states with key races moved to cut sites for the midterms. Republicans gutted Sunday voting hours in the Tar Heel State, and GOP officials slashed polling places in a major Texas battleground county by 30%.

And while Trump has spent much of his second term pulling teeth to find minute figures of noncitizen voters, the American public has other concerns.

In fact, while just over a third of respondents said they’re more concerned about ineligible people voting, more respondents (56%) said eligible voters not voting is a bigger problem. It turns out the latter worry is well-founded.

As revealed in a new Democracy Docket analysis this week, a whopping 72,000 ballots were rejected in the 2026 primary election within just six states. The number of noncitizen voters found nationwide over the past 14 years was 588.

Further, while it’s still unclear if threats to send troops or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to polling places will be carried out, despite both being illegal, Americans don’t want federal agents at the polls. Three out of four respondents also said they oppose nationalizing election administration, a power that’s constitutionally vested in the states and not the president or his cabinet.

Finally, while there was some opposition toward federal election threats across all voters, these questions were met with more partisan divide.

Nine in 10 Democrats said they oppose the federal government tracking personal voter data, in contrast with 43% of Republicans. And 90% of Democrats expressed opposition to conditioning state funding on compliance with demands to hand over such data, with just 21% of Republicans rejecting this.