Electoral Fraud and Public Opinion: Using Survey Experimental Data from Korea

In the aftermath of the 21st general election in Korea held on April 15, 2020, some started raising concerns of fraud. Not only the losing opposition conservative party candidate raised some blanket allegations about fraud, a prominent American scholar of election forensics released a report on the matter and some even went to the extent of claiming that China rigged the elections upon the request from the sitting president. Using a nationally representative sample of more than 1,500 respondents in Korea, we conducted a survey experiment in three months after an actual election, in order to investigate how claims of electoral fraud affect people’s belief in the legitimacy of election results.