Election officials can build public trust in procedures and results — even among suspicious voters who fear partisan manipulation — by creating videos that factually explain their security safeguards in simple terms.
Such are the findings of studies co-authored by a UC Riverside scholar, offering sound strategies for election officials to respond to false claims and conspiracy theories about election fraud and security, as well as suspicions that arise when the counting of mail-in ballots delays results.
“If election officials explain why a delay might occur in advance, then voters are less likely to have a negative response,” said Jennifer Gaudette, an assistant professor in the UCR School of Public Policy and co-author of the research published in the Election Law Journal, British Journal of Political Science, and PNAS Nexus.
In their recently published Election Law Journal article, the researchers examined a challenge built into America's decentralized election system. While states have broad authority to set their own election rules, they mostly follow the same security procedures. But voters typically know little about how elections are run in other states. Partisan distrust can fill that information gap.
For example, Gaudette and her colleagues found that Republicans nationwide were less likely to trust elections in heavily Democratic California, while Democrats nationwide expressed less confidence in elections in Republican-dominated Texas.
While the team previously established that simple, factual videos about election security could increase voters’ trust in elections, they wanted to know if that same factual information could change partisan views about other states.
The team conducted survey experiments involving nearly 15,000 people. Participants came from a nationwide sample and samples in Texas, Georgia, Colorado and Los Angeles County.
Some watched videos produced by election officials explaining safeguards used to protect votes. Texans and Georgians watched messages about California elections. Colorado and Los Angeles County participants watched videos about Texas. The national sample was divided between California and Texas messages.
The results were significant.
After watching the videos, trust in elections in the targeted states increased by an average of 10 to 12.5 percentage points, and the improvement crossed party lines. Republicans became more trusting of elections in Democratic states, Democrats became more trusting of elections in Republican states, and independents also showed gains.
The findings suggest partisan distrust of election security isn’t necessarily set in stone.
“You can move people on this by giving them the facts,” Gaudette said.
A related experiment in a follow-up study suggests election officials don’t need Hollywood-style production values to change minds.
An informal vertical cellphone video Gaudette recorded herself worked about as well as professionally produced videos.
For that research, Gaudette sat in her car and recorded herself speaking directly into her cellphone camera. She explained two basic election-security facts: Voting machines are not connected to the internet, and ballot counting has bipartisan oversight.
More than 8,000 Americans participated in the cellphone video study. Some watched Gaudette's informal social media-style video. Others watched professionally produced videos from election officials in Dane County, Wisconsin, and Maricopa County, Arizona.
The homemade video produced similar increases in election trust as the professionally produced ones when compared with those who watched no election video.
It was also more memorable. People who watched Gaudette’s cellphone video were 8 to 9 percentage points more likely than those who watched the official videos to correctly remember the two election-security facts.
Younger adults were particularly receptive. Just 3% of respondents ages 18 to 24 described the informal video as misleading, compared with 15% of those 55 and older.
“State and local officials should work hard to communicate to people on a variety of platforms because social media is where many of these claims explode,” Gaudette said. “They should explain how our ballots are kept secure, how vote counting works, and why it can sometimes lead to delays.”
The Election Law Journal study’s title is “Can Public Information Campaigns Restore Trust in American Elections Across Polarized State and Party Lines?” In addition to Gaudette, the co-authors are Seth Hill and Thad Kousser, UC San Diego; Mackenzie Lockhart, independent researcher; Mindy Romero, USC Center for Inclusive Democracy; and Laura Uribe, U Georgia.
Header image: Election workers in Phoenix, Ariz., in 2022. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
