Many U.S. voters distrust ballot tally

WASHINGTON -- Count on close, contentious elections to stir up public distrust in the vote count.

That could be why people in the United States, Italy and Mexico had the lowest levels of confidence in the vote count among nine countries in AP-Ipsos polling taken just weeks before the U.S. midterm elections. Two-thirds or fewer in each of the three countries said they were confident the vote count would be accurate.

That's lower than in the other countries polled -- Canada, France, Germany, South Korea, Spain and the United Kingdom, where three-fourths or more in each country felt the vote count is accurate.

"If we're going to have an effective democracy, we can't lose confidence in the institutions that deal with the votes," said Gabriel Nunez, a 39-year-old sales clerk in Mexico City.

In Mexico, Italy and the United States, recent contested elections left one side feeling cheated.

* In Mexico this past summer, ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon was proclaimed the winner after the country's top electoral court rejected claims by leftist candidate Andres Manual Lopez Obrador of widespread fraud. By the end of the year, Mexicans will have an elected president, and the man he beat will have been "inaugurated" president by his followers.

* In Italy's parliamentary elections in April, outgoing Premier Silvio Berlusconi alleged the vote was marred by irregularities and for weeks refused to accept the narrow-margin victory of Romano Prodi's center-left coalition.

* In the United States, the 2000 election was contested for more than a month before the Supreme Court ended the dispute, enabling Republican George W. Bush to be certified the winner over Democrat Al Gore. The 2004 election had enough problems to bring back memories from four years earlier.

Germans had a close election in 2005 but worked out a compromise and the German people accepted the count with little outcry.

The U.S. complaints in 2000 and again in 2004 left Charlotte Blum, an independent voter from Fairfax, Vt., with doubts about the accuracy of the vote count. "People were asking for recounts," she said of the 2004 voting. "It's a bad atmosphere for the country."

The telephone polls of about 1,000 adults in each of the countries were taken between Sept. 8 and Oct. 1. Each poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.