Voting Experiences, Perceptions of Fraud, and Voter Confidence

Abstract

Assuring voter confidence is important for the legitimacy of democratic elections. In this paper we take advantage of a large online survey of registered voters in a single election jurisdiction, Orange County (CA), that was implemented immediately after the November 2018 midterm elections, to test four hypotheses about the correlates of voter confidence. Our results show that voters who cast mail ballots are less confident about their own votes being counted correctly than in-person voters. For both types of voters, those who have poor experiences with the voting process are much less likely to report confidence in the election. We also find that voters who have strong concerns about election fraud are less likely to report being confident in the election. Our last result indicates that information from news and social media is associated with a decline in voter confidence in election administration at the national level. Given the many conversations about election fraud that have occurred since the 2016 presidential election, we conclude by discussing the implications of our results for future elections in the United States.

Who are the Election Skeptics? Evidence from the 2022 Midterm Elections

“…Only 30 percent of election skeptics believe that it is impossible to build "design an election system that makes cheating impossible." Voters seemingly display skepticism in changes to election administration technologies, such as utilization of electronic voting machines (Alvarez, Levin and Li, 2018) and voting by mail (Alvarez, Cao and Li, 2021), but as voters become more familiar with such technologies and make habits of voting, we may see reductions in election skepticism (Alvarez, Hall and Llewellyn, 2008;Gerber, Green and Shachar, 2003). This is not to say, however, that Americans can passively wait for improvements in voter confidence.…”

Access or Experience? Determinants of Distrust in US Elections

“…1 States have expanded the use of VBM both to reduce the cost of administering elections and to increase the convenience of voting in order to improve voter turnout (Gerber et al, 2013; Gronke et al, 2008). A small but developing literature on VBM systems suggests that implementing VBM policies may increase distrust in elections (Alvarez et al, 2021; Clark, 2021b), although this may be mediated by context, such as the need to do so during a global pandemic (Safarpour & Hanmer, 2020). This distrust may arise for at least two different reasons.…”

Political Parties and Loser’s Consent in American Politics

“…Social media sites have been used to raise money for election fraud and other disinformation campaigns (Elmer and Ward-Kimola 2022). Social media facilitates the rapid spread of false claims (Chiu et al 2022), including narratives about election fraud that fueled the January 6th violence (Alvarez, Cao, and Li 2021; The Election Integrity Partnership 2021). There is evidence that conservatives are more likely than moderates or liberals to spread false information (DeVerna et al 2024; Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019).…”