Election Officials Fight Voter Skepticism After Trump’s False Fraud Claims

“Good question, because there’s a lot of misinformation going on about that right now,” said Mr. Wilcox, who has overseen the Republican-leaning county’s elections for nearly a decade. He said that each polling site prints out paper copies of the results, and poll workers physically bring the paper and a memory stick to the county office. “My tabulators in no way whatsoever are connected to the internet,” he said.

Educational efforts like this have taken on a new urgency in Florida and around the country as many supporters of former Republican President Donald Trump continue to question his election defeat. As skepticism about the election system has spread, some election administrators like Mr. Wilcox worry that voters might give up on participating and lose confidence in America’s democracy.

To be sure, it isn’t new for supporters of a losing candidate from either party to question election results. But polls show increasing polarization on whether voters trust the election system.

In 2020, 22% of Republicans were confident that ballots were counted accurately nationwide, compared with 93% of Democrats, according to a survey by MIT researchers. That represented a bigger gap than in 2016, when 80% of Republicans had that confidence in the results, which showed that GOP presidential candidate Mr. Trump had won, compared with 69% of Democrats.

“I don’t think they ever gave it a lot of thought,” said Mary Clark, the longtime elections clerk in Delta Township in Michigan, a state President Biden won in 2020. “They just trusted the system.”

But this year, Ms. Clark, a Democrat, has a new plan to offer informational sessions where residents can learn more about the election system. “I moved it to the top of the to-do list for 2022,” she said.

In Florida, Mr. Wilcox said tours of his election office aren’t new, but this year his office has heard from more voters questioning the results and demanding extra audits. Mr. Trump won Marion County with about 62% of the vote in 2020, roughly the same as his 61% in 2016. He carried Florida in both elections.

Asked about Mr. Trump, Mr. Wilcox said the problem is broader. “It’s too big to be one person,” he said. “And I don’t know that any one person could even stop it.”

“Many Republican voters are believing what former President Trump says about the election, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster based in Virginia. Mr. Ayres said that changes to election rules were another point of contention. “Democrats think Republican changes are designed to suppress the vote, and Republicans think Democratic changes are designed to ensure opportunities for fraud,” Mr. Ayres said.

Many states rapidly expanded voting by mail during 2020 because of Covid-19 pandemic concerns, drawing backlash from some Republicans who said it raised security concerns. Social media also enabled dubious claims to spread quickly, including false allegations about voting machines switching votes and purported dumps of fake ballots.

Still, despite the challenges, last year’s vote unfolded with record high turnout and few problems. A group of federal, state and local election officials said it was the most secure election in U.S. history.

False claims that the election was stolen have even spread beyond swing states to places that Mr. Trump won comfortably in 2020. In Idaho, some people who claim the election was stolen from Mr. Trump called for extra audits, even though Mr. Trump won by a roughly 30-point margin.

Some of the claims “are that it was a blanket manipulation across the country,” said Idaho Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck, a Republican. Mr. Houck said that officials flagged a few individual cases of potential fraud, but nothing systemic that could have affected the presidential outcome.

To try to address false fraud claims, the Idaho secretary of state’s office began publishing short videos, called the “Citizen’s Guide to Voting,” which cover topics including absentee voting and how officials prosecute election crimes.

Election officials around the country say they have exchanged ideas about how to combat skepticism. Beginning in 2019, for example, the National Association of Secretaries of State, a bipartisan group representing most states’ top election officials, launched its #TrustedInfo initiative on social media, which encourages voters to seek out reliable sources of information.

Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican who served as vice chairman of the city’s election board during the 2020 election, said he is increasingly concerned. “Far from getting better, it might actually be getting worse,” said Mr. Schmidt, who in January is starting a new job leading a nonpartisan good-government group, the Committee of Seventy. “The apparent overwhelming majority of voters in my party still haven’t accepted the truth about the 2020 election, despite all evidence showing that it was fair and secure.”

Mr. Schmidt received graphic threats aimed at him and his family after Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020. Other election officials around the U.S. also have reported a wave of harassment and threats. In Marion County, Mr. Wilcox said he hasn’t received a direct threat, but safety has become a bigger concern.

Looking ahead, Mr. Wilcox worries that some voters will feel discouraged from participating in future elections. “If people get disenfranchised from this and stop participating, I believe that’s the beginning of the downfall of our democracy,” he said.

Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com