Weeks before the first votes of the 2020 presidential election, Americans report a high level of concern about how secure that election will be and worry about the perils of disinformation, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they believed the U.S. is not very prepared or not prepared at all to keep November’s election safe and secure.

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Reflecting the polarization of the Trump era, two-thirds of Democrats think the country isn’t prepared, while 85% of Republicans said they think it is.

“Like so many issues, Americans view election security from opposite poles of the partisan divide,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll.

President Trump, who has often disputed the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election, gets low marks from many voters on his handling of election security.

Driven by Democrats and independents, 56% of those surveyed think Trump has not done very much or has done nothing at all to make sure there will be no future election interference — although 75% of Republicans think he has done enough.

“I can trust [Trump’s] word to know that he is going to try as best as he can … in order to stop influence from foreign countries in our elections,” said first-time voter Joel Martin, a Republican from California.

Martin and other respondents were contacted by NPR for follow-up interviews after they had given their initial responses to questions from Marist pollsters.

Trump faces an impeachment trial this month tied directly to his efforts to get Ukraine to launch an investigation into one of his potential 2020 rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.

And despite the scrutiny and criticism of his actions with respect to Ukraine, Trump also said in October that China should “start an investigation into the Bidens.”

Remarks like those may have been on the mind of the 51% of the Americans surveyed who said Trump had encouraged election interference. Eighty-eight percent of Democrats and 51% of independents backed that assertion.

“I considered the attack on our electoral system to be the single biggest assault on United States sovereignty since Pearl Harbor,” said poll participant Dimitri Laddis, an independent voter from New York.

“The fact that the commander in chief has done nothing to reassure us that we are safe from such an attack — and the fact that he seems to be keenly aware that he benefits from outside forces having influence over our elections — is very disheartening,” Laddis said.

Although there is no evidence that any votes were changed by a foreign power in 2016 or 2018, almost 4 in 10 Americans surveyed said they believe it is likely another country will tamper with the votes cast in 2020 in order to change the result.

The poll’s results also paint a picture of a polarized electorate wary about what it reads and not fully convinced that elections are fair.

In a reflection of how divided the country is, only 62% of Americans said U.S. elections are fair.

Barely half of Democrats agree with that sentiment, perhaps a reflection of lingering unhappiness that Donald Trump won the 2016 election by capturing the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.

And even as Trump has continued to claim without evidence that millions of votes were cast illegally in 2016, 80% of Republicans surveyed reported that they believe elections are fair.

“Many Americans think election cycles are no longer on the up and up,” said Miringoff, the Marist director. “These opinions are a troublesome sign about this keystone of our democracy.”

Disinformation

Intelligence and elections officials work hard to reassure voters about the integrity of the system, but there is concern about the effect of disinformation in the political discourse. False, misleading and agitating material were a big part of Russia’s active measures in 2016.

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Americans retain concerns about this today; 59% of those surveyed reported that it is hard to tell the difference between what is factual and what is misleading information.

Despite nearly four years’ worth of attention to disinformation, 55% of Americans say it will be harder to identify deceptive information than it was in 2016.

Eighty-two percent of those surveyed said they believe they will read misleading information on social media and a similar proportion believe foreign countries will spread false information about candidates this year.

The public does not trust big social network and tech companies to prevent their platforms from being misused to present election interference, the poll revealed.

Seventy-five percent of those surveyed are not confident about the tech companies, a 9-point increase from a similar 2018 NPR/Marist poll.

Despite casting blame on tech companies for spreading disinformation, there was little consensus on who should be most responsible for reducing its flow: 39% pointed to the media, 18% to tech companies, 15% to the government and 12% to the public itself.

Not surprisingly given Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the media peddles in “fake news,” 54% of Republicans say it’s the media’s responsibility to stop the spread of disinformation.

Voting rights and election administration

Americans who responded to the poll were divided about what they considered the biggest threat to the election — 35% said disinformation is the biggest threat; 24% blamed voter fraud; 16% said voter suppression; 15% blamed foreign interference.

In yet another sign that voters live in very different media bubbles, voter suppression was cited as the greatest threat for Democrats. Voter fraud topped the list for Republicans. Independents were most concerned with misleading information.

By an overwhelming margin, Americans said they found voting to be easy, and most have not encountered problems with confusing ballots, problems with their voter ID or registration or broken voting machines.

But more than a third of younger and nonwhite voters say they have experienced long lines.

Moreover, women and nonwhite respondents are considerably more likely than men and white voters to say that their own vote won’t be counted. And half of women and slightly more than half of nonwhite respondents said many votes will not be counted, in contrast to men and white Americans, who are more confident that all ballots will be tallied.

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“People are trying to redline the country to stop different ethnic groups from voting,” said Larry Swoffard, an African American poll respondent from California.

Local election officials get relatively high marks from voters, with 68% expressing confidence that officials will run a fair election in 2020. Nearly 6 in 10 respondents say they plan to vote in person on Election Day. Twenty-three percent say they will vote by mail or absentee ballot. Another 18% said they would cast their ballot at an early voting site.

NPR’s Domenico Montanaro and Lexie Schapitl contributed reporting to this story.

The phone survey of 1,259 adults was conducted by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion between Jan. 7 and Jan. 12. It has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points when adults are referenced and 3.8 percentage points when registered voters are referenced.

Hundreds of migrants from Central America on Monday moved off a closed border bridge and waded across the Suchiate River at the Guatemala-Mexico border after Mexican officials informed the group they would not be permitted to move farther into the country.

With the river low from the dry season, migrants were able to cross but were met with the Mexico’s National Guard lining the river’s banks on the other side.

The caravan of migrants are now on Mexican territory and are being prevented from transiting through the country by scores of armed Mexican National Guard members, some outfitted in riot gear, who are under orders from government officials to block their entry.

At least 4,000 people who hoped to travel northward to the U.S. entered Guatemala from Honduras last week, according to the Guatemalan government. The migrants threatened to enter by force if authorities refuse to allow that. But now, in Mexico, security officials apparently are not planning to budge.

Brayan Hernandez, 26, was carrying his 1-year-old baby, Daisy, when he approached the river.

“It’s more scary [to cross the river] when you’re with your child but we don’t have any other option,” he said. “I never expected Mexico to react like this. It makes me angry. We didn’t attack them,” he said.

Hernandez added: “Our goal is to go to the United States. We aren’t turning around here.”

It is unclear how the standoff between the large group of migrants and Mexican National Guard members will end, but many of the migrants say they are determined to make it into the country somehow.

The latest showdown between Central American migrants and Mexico’s border enforcers comes after the Mexican government told the Trump administration it would clamp down on migration flows toward Mexico’s border with the U.S. Trump has threatened to impose economic sanctions on Mexico if it doesn’t crack down harder on migrants.

Jessica Corrales Torres, 40, and her 12-year-old daughter were among those prevented from moving through Mexico. Having her journey cut short, she said, is dispiriting.

“It’s hard, very hard. There are not a lot of jobs. There’s a lot of crime. It’s insecure more than anything else,” Corrales said of her home country of Honduras. “It’s horrible.”

She adds: “If you could go to the U.S., who wouldn’t? But if not, I’ll settle for anywhere I can find work.”

But she and the other migrants have been confused by mixed messages from Mexico’s top officials. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a press conference recently that there are more than 4,000 jobs available for migrants in the caravan, only to later say that most of the migrants who hand themselves into authorities will actually be deported.

On Saturday, tensions flared between migrants hoping to make a journey to the U.S. and Mexican troops, who used pepper spray and shut a large metal gate at the crossing to thwart the group. There were fewer confrontations on Monday, though both migrants and Mexican National Guard members were seen tossing rocks at each other.

So far, Mexican authorities have protected the border more successfully than in 2018, when a caravan of some 8,000 people, many fleeing violence, persecution and poverty, crossed the border illegally, grabbing the attention of Trump, who has called large caravans of migrants “an invasion.”

The president has used the image of migrant caravans as part of the reason to spend billions of dollars to erect a border wall with Mexico.

Trump upended American’s longstanding asylum procedures with the Remain in Mexico program in which tens of thousands of asylum-seekers are forced wait for the outcome of their court cases in Mexico. Less than 1% of the cases lead to successful entry into the U.S.

“The message is clear,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said at a news conference in Washington last month.

“They will no longer be allowed to exploit our laws. And to be allowed into our country based on fraudulent claims,” Morgan said. “Those loopholes have been closed.”

NPR’s Carrie Kahn and Joel Rose contributed to this report.