Election Officials as Trusted Messengers: Assessing the Effects of Trust-Building Social Media Campaigns on Voters’ Trust in Election Officials during the 2022 Midterm Election

• In Event: Trust and Confidence in Elections and Election Administration

Abstract

The climate of distrust spurred by the 2020 presidential election creates an opportunity to study what factors insulate voter confidence in real time. Faced with rising mis- and disinformation, states serve as test cases that can help us better understand which interventions are most successful in preserving confidence amidst cross-state threats. We hypothesize that voters in states with strong voter education and outreach habits (operationalized through the state election offices’ social media usage) have higher trust in ballot counting than those that have weak or no social media presence. We also hypothesize that officials who structure their messages around trust might improve voters’ perceptions of election integrity, making voters more likely to turn to officials for information, in turn improving their voting experience and increasing confidence. We merge a unique dataset of all trust-building social media communications from election officials during the 2022 election cycle with two national surveys, the Survey of the Performance of American Elections and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s survey on preferred sources of election information. We find that voters were more likely to select an election official as one of their top three preferred sources of election information in states where officials shared a higher proportion of trust-building messages relative to all election-related communications. Our findings establish a strong connection between voter education and public attitudes about election officials, who have been operating under intense public scrutiny since the 2020 election.

Authors

• Rachel Orey, Bipartisan Policy Center

• Mara Suttmann-Lea, Connecticut College

• Thessalia Merivaki, Georgetown University