Trump's mail-in voter worries had ramifications for Canada

Donald Trump wasn't quiet about the problems that he had with mail-in voting following the 2020 U.S. Election. And all of his bluster had serious ramifications for America's neighbor to the north.

In September 2020, Trump made several negative claims about the integrity of mail-in voting, including that it was rife with fraud and that ballots were even being manipulated according to an Associated Press report at the time. 

“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” the former president declared, and it appears that Trump’s skepticism about mail-in voting before 2021 had a very interesting impact on the Canadian electorate. 

A study published in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly found that the skepticism surrounding mail-in voting made popular by Trump in 2020 may have affected Canadian attitudes toward mail-in voting. 

Not every Canadian voting block was affected by the former president’s untruths about mail-in voting, but there was a particular segment of the Canadian electorate that took Trump’s skepticism to heart. 

Researchers discovered that Canadians with populist and right-wing views were more likely to distrust mail-in voting. However, this was not the only big discovery the researchers made. 

Analyzing how Trump’s rhetoric affected the Canadian electorate wasn't a straightforward task but researchers used survey results from the 2021 Canadian Election Study to help look at mail-in voting perceptions in Canada. 

The sample size included over 10,000 Canadian citizens and included information about politics and behaviors, which included answers to questions that allowed researchers to gauge a participant’s political populist attitudes and thoughts on mail-in voting. 

Interestingly, the 2021 Canadian Election Study also looked at how much exposure to political news participants, particularly U.S. news, were able to conclude how exposure to American news has affected Canadian views on mail-in voting.  

The researchers also conducted a separate analysis of French Canadians in Quebec to see if exposure to U.S. political news had less of an effect on French Canadians versus English Canadians, and the final conclusions were a bit startling. 

Researchers discovered not only were those with populist and ring-view political views more likely to distrust mail-in voting, but they also found that one of the key drivers was exposure to political news media, particularly news from the United States. 

“Our analysis suggests that Canadians holding populist views — and, in particular, those holding right-wing populist views (would-be Trump supporters) — are less trusting of voting by mail,” study author Cary Wu of York University told PsyPost. 

Canadians who frequently engaged with political news, again particularly U.S. political news, were found to be more skeptical of mail-in voting if they held populist views, but the real kicker was that this effect was less pronounced with French Canadians. 

Further study is needed to better understand the ramifications of the research, but Wu noted while speaking to Psy Post that “Trump’s attacks on voting by mail have global implications.”

“It lowers people’s trust in voting by mail in the United States and in Canada, as we have shown, and probably in other parts of the world as well,” Wu continued. How the former president’s speech affects societies, in general, has become known as the ‘Trump Effect’.

In Canada, it seems clear from the research that the Trump Effect is playing a role in the country, at least when it comes to some people’s views on mail-in voting. Wu stated that there is still more to learn, but her findings so far are quite concerning…

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