Voter confidence

In the summer of 2001, the National Commission on Federal Election Reform issued its report, To Ensure Pride and Confidence in American Elections. Seven years later, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Crawford v. Marion County Board of Elections that strict photo voter ID laws were constitutional, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance because it encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.” In the aftermath of the 2020 elections, many state legislatures considered a variety of restrictive election laws, including in Georgia. In the remarks he made after signing SB 202, Governor Brian Kemp stated, "There’s no doubt there were many alarming issues with how the election was handled, and those problems understandably led to a crisis of confidence in the ballot box here in Georgia."

Viewing voter confidence as a measure of the quality of American elections and assuming that it is linked to the willingness of Americans to vote are intuitively appealing. However, research finds only a weak causal connection between voter confidence and voter turnout—it has not found clear causal evidence that certain high-profile election administration practices, such as voter ID laws, affect voter confidence.

Surveys have measured public opinion about voter confidence for over two decades. The strongest influence on voter confidence in such surveys, regardless of how the question is asked, is whether the candidate one supports has won or lost an election. This is known as the “winner-loser effect.”Beyond this phenomenon, voter confidence has been found to be influenced to a lesser degree by other factors, including the intensity of partisan competition and the experience of casting ballots.

When measuring anything, it's important to consider what exact concept is being measured and whether the measurement approach actually captures it. When we try to measure the confidence of voters, we need to ask exactly what they're confident about: that the election was fair? That the votes were counted as they were cast?

When political scientists study voter confidence, they ask voters some variant of the question, “Do you believe that votes in the most recent election were counted as cast?” This question focuses on the mechanics of marking a ballot and having it counted accurately, which is narrower than asking whether the last election was fair—and asking whether the last election was fair is narrower than asking whether “elections in America are usually fair.”

Within this specific academic context, answers about voter confidence are fairly consistent regardless of the precise wording of the question. However, there is one important exception to this pattern of consistency: when survey respondents are asked about their confidence in the parts of the electoral process with which they have direct contact, such as their own vote, they are much more confident than when asked about parts of the electoral process they have indirect contact with, such as the process in the nation as a whole. One consequence of this is that in political debates involving voter confidence, it is possible to cherry-pick survey research in support of arguments that voters either have high levels of confidence in American politics or do not.

Here's an example of how degrees of voter confidence vary with the degree of direct voter contact with the process. In the MIT module of the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), respondents were asked the following question before the election: “How confident are you that your vote in the General Election will be as you intend?” They were also asked, “How confident are you that votes in [your county/your state/nationwide] will be counted as voters intend?” The response categories were very confident, somewhat confident, not too confident, not at all confident, and don’t know.

Looking at the responses to these questions (Figure 1), two patterns immediately jump out. First, regardless of the target of the question (“your vote,” the “local vote,” etc.), confidence was greater after the election than before. For instance, the percentage of voters who said they were very confident their vote would be counted as they intended was 38% before the election, but this jumped to 61% when asked after the election.

We've already seen that answers to voter-confidence survey questions vary as the target of the question changes. What else affects voter confidence? The main answer points us in two directions related to political outcomes—who wins, and how close elections are.

The “winner-loser effect” is illustrated by the changing answers to voter confidence questions since they were first asked in 2000. Figure 3 shows the percentage of respondents who reported they were very confident their vote was counted as intended in the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, which was conducted immediately after the 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections. The data for prior elections shows the percentages taken from commercial public opinion polls and reported in research by Michael Sances and Charles Stewart III.

It's common to justify election reforms by arguing they will increase voter confidence in the electoral system. However, there's little evidence that election administration has a direct effect on voter confidence. The major exception to this statement is that voters who experience problems at polling places tend to be less confident than voters who don’t.

The issue of voter confidence and election reforms has been front and center in justifications for stricter voter ID laws. (If you want to read more about this issue in detail, please see our Voter ID explainer.) As noted above, Justice Stevens’s decision justifying the constitutionality of strict voter ID laws in Crawford v. Marion County Board of Elections credited Indiana’s argument that strict voter ID laws could increase voter confidence. However, subsequent research on this question by Stephen Ansolabehere, Shaun Bowler, Nathaniel Persily, and Charles Stewart III reveals no correlation between the adoption of strict voter ID laws and increases in voter confidence (Ansolabehere 2009; Ansolabehere and Persily 2007; Bowler et al. 2015; Stewart et al. 2016). Indeed, if anything, the political climate created by debates about strict ID laws could actually be reducing confidence and further polarizing opinions along partisan lines, according to studies by Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan in 2021 and Lonna Atkeson in 2014.

Voter confidence is also influenced by a voter’s general experience with the administrative process; a positive encounter for a voter reinforces their trust in the system. Research by scholars such as Lonna Atkeson, R. Michael Alvarez, Thad Hall, and Paul Gronke tells us that voters tend to be more confident when they don’t wait a long time to vote, when they encounter officials at their polling place who seem competent, and when they vote in person rather than by mail. These factors can be affected by state policies as well as local administrators' decisions about how to allocate resources to polling places and how rigorously they train poll workers.

Recent research has also explored whether messaging from election officials can help increase trust in the electoral process. One article by Gaudette et al. in 2025 argues that election official outreach can improve “polarized trust,” or the difference in confidence that voters have in election administration depending on whether the state is run by their preferred party. They find that voters of all parties become more trusting in the integrity of elections when they learn about other states’ election systems. In another Gaudette et al. article from 2025, they find that messaging from state and local election officials can improve trust in their own state’s elections. In a 2025 article, Suttmann-Lea and Merivaki acknowledge that while messaging from elected officials can establish them as credible sources for election information, it doesn’t always build confidence in vote counting. They also point out that state election officials may have a more difficult time building trust compared to local election officials because of reduced proximity. It remains to be seen whether certain messages are more effective than others in improving confidence.

• Pew Research Center | Public opinion research and reports

• Roper Center | Public opinion research

• Alvarez, R. Michael, Thad E. Hall, and Morgan H. Llewellyn. 2008. "Are Americans Confident their Ballots are Counted?" The Journal of Politics 70 (3): 754–766.
• Atkeson, Lonna Rae, and Kyle L. Saunders. 2008. The Effect of Election Administration on Voter Confidence: A Local Matter?” PS: Political Science & Politics 40 (4): 655–660. 
• Atkeson, Lonna Rae, R. Michael Alvarez, and Thad E. Hall. 2015. "Voter Confidence: How to Measure It and How It Differs from Government Support." Election Law Journal 14 (3): 207–219.
• Gronke, Paul, Eva Galenes-Rosenbaum, Peter A. Miller, and Daniel Toffey. 2014. "Voter Confidence as a Metric of Election Performance." In The Measure of American Elections, eds. Barry C. Burden and Charles Stewart III. New York: Cambridge University Press, 248–270. 
• Hall, Thad E., J. Quin Monson, and Kelly D. Patterson. 2009. " The Human Dimension of Elections: How Poll Workers Shape Public Confidence in Elections." Political Research Quarterly 62 (3): 507–522.
• Sances, Michael W., and Charles Stewart III. 2015. "Partisanship and Confidence in the Vote Count: Evidence from U.S. National Elections since 2000." Electoral Studies 40 (December 2015): 176–188.
• Sinclair B, Smith SS, Tucker PD. “It’s Largely a Rigged System”: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016. Political Research Quarterly. 2018;71(4):854-868. doi:10.1177/1065912918768006