New paper from Jennifer Gaudette (UC San Diego), Seth J. Hill (UC San Diego), Thad Kousser (UC San Diego), Mackenzie Lockhart (Yale University), Mindy Romero (USC), Laura Uribe (UC San Diego) . Abstract:

The Constitution grants power over election administration to the states, but this presents a formidable challenge in our present era when states are polarizing along party lines, diverging in policy, and in near-constant conflict.  Although non-partisan election officials use similar methods to protect and verify the counting of ballots across the nation, voters who are unaware of these protections may rely on their knowledge about other policy conflict to determine how much they trust the integrity of other states’ elections.  Here we document evidence that federalism and partisan polarization combine to hinder trust in elections across state lines.  With a large survey of Americans, we show first that voters trust the integrity of their own state’s elections more than the integrity of other states. This divergence is larger for trust in the elections run by California and Texas, states with reputations for one-party ideological control.  We then present survey experimental findings showing that non-partisan messaging produced by California and Texas election officials for their own voters can work across state (and party) lines.  Texas messaging improves the trust of Californians (and Coloradans) in Texas elections and California messaging builds trust by Texans (and Georgians) in California elections. This improvement does not depend upon the party of respondents; even red-state Republicans and blue-state Democrats increase their trust in California and Texas elections with the messaging.  Our experiment provides evidence that a robust public information campaign could help overcome polarized trust in election integrity across state lines