What would be enough to persuade voters to trust U.S. elections?

A certain segment of the American population will not be persuaded to trust in election results, seemingly no matter what. But for a much larger group, there are certain steps that evidence suggests would be reassuring — increasing or restoring trust in federal election results.

Whether or not this happens can be consequential for the United States, as it is for any nation. "The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties," said President Reagan in 1982 when he signed an extension to the Voting Rights Act. The former president of the University of Notre Dame, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh went further, calling voting "a civic sacrament."

What it means when this central ritual of democracy becomes held in deep suspicion is no longer a theoretical question for the United States. In fairness, challenging outcomes of a "closely fought presidential contest" as "illegitimate," observed Robert Mitchell in The Washington Post, is "almost as old as the republic itself." Yet the level of public distrust in elections may have reached new highs in the past couple of years.

How many people trust American elections? The past eight years have seen a steady deterioration in public trust in elections across the political spectrum. Prior to the 2016 election, Republicans and Democrats had almost the same amount of distrust — while in 2018, majorities of Republican and Democrats expressed confidence in U.S. elections (87% and 79% respectively).

Yet heading into November 2020, as the first Trump administration was coming to a close, 65% of Republicans said they trusted the American election system, but only 48% of Democrats and 44% of independents did. Two years later, in the wake of Biden's win, Republican trust in elections had dropped sharply to 56% expressing confidence, compared with an increase to 88% among Democrats.

Thad Kousser, a political scientist at UC San Diego points to a "winner effect" that's obvious in these shifting numbers — where the "winning side and losing side shift their positions" on whether an election can be trusted.

"It's like watching a football game, right? You're not gonna trust the call if it goes against your team. ...This is part of human nature."

What about voter trust right now? A Deseret News Harris X poll from the first week of August 2024 found 43% of Republicans expressing a lack of confidence in the validity of presidential elections — compared with 16% of Democrats who were unsure.

This confidence increases in both groups when it comes to local and state elections, with as much as 22% more trust in the case of Republicans. But compared with a majority of people of every party who trust elections in their own state, citizens simply don't feel the same way about other states. For example, 63% of Republicans say they trust their state's elections, compared with 41% who trust other states' elections. (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas were mentioned most often in a 2024 analysis as having results voters weren't sure they trusted.)

Part of this undoubtedly reflects distrust in government as a whole. A 2024 Pew survey found only 16% of the public — the smallest figure in 70 years — trusts the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Reflecting on these findings, The New York Times suggested that the United States is "a country unified by discontent."

What factors contribute to distrust among voters? On a structural level, anything that removes voting from a traditional in-person, hand-counted system seems to elicit distrust, especially among conservatives. This includes mail-in or absentee ballots, early voting, late ballot acceptance and electronic voting systems (Dominion being one of the nine systems certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission).

Kousser suggests that Republican mistrust of elections among both Republican and independent voters is "really focused on voting by mail" (with 51% and 35% of these two voting blocks expressing lack of trust in this form of voting).

Adding to the suspicion are circulated stories about illegal voting, such as fake ballot registrations, multiple ballots from one person, or migrants accessing a ballot, whether accurate or not (About half of Republicans and a third of independent voters express concern with ineligible ballots, compared with only 10% of Democrats).

Dave Moore tells about discovering his parents — who had been deceased for years after being life-long Republicans — on the voting rolls in their home state of California. After alerting election authorities in the state to the problem, their names were removed from the rolls. But a few months later, he checked again, and they were back on.

How common of a problem is this? In 2012, researchers found 1.2 million deceased people still on the voting rolls nationally, with the state of Virginia finding last year close to 19K deceased people on the voting rolls. Yet a 2020 Stanford analysis concurs with audits of the 2020 election that ballots from deceased people are only rarely used to actually vote fraudulently.

Voting recounts add to distrust among some voters too. Although Democrats tend to be far more trusting of elections overall, when they express distrust, that centers more on obstacles they are concerned have been created to make voting more difficult, such as requiring a voter ID law, taking away a chance to vote early or having to stand in long lines.

In their comprehensive analysis of voter distrust, Campaign Legal identified two primary creators of disinformation campaigns: the Russian Internet Research Agency, and GOP candidates who directly reject the legitimacy of elections where GOP candidates lost.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that according to 2022 Pew data, how warmly voters feel toward former President Donald Trump correlates with how confident they are that absentee or mail ballots can be trusted (with most Republicans continuing to doubt they will be counted fairly).

Can anything move the voting trust numbers? Any measure or law designed to either weed out ineligible ballots or bring voting closer to a more traditional in-person practice seems likely to increase confidence among conservative voters.

For instance, a 2024 Pew survey found Republicans almost unanimous (93%) in supporting measures to require all voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls (61% of Democrats also favored the measure). At the same time, Democrats are almost twice as much in favor (80%) of automatic voter registration for all eligible citizens compared with Republicans (45%).

Our recent Deseret News/Harris X poll also found 64% of Republicans saying that that mandatory ID checks before voting are needed in order to improve U.S. elections (compared with 27% of Democrats) — followed in popularity by more supervision of vote counting (40% Republicans, 23% Democrats) and stricter requirement for mail-in voting (36% Republicans, 9% Democrats).

Everything else — more accessible polling locations, more use of paper ballots, shorter lines, counting votes faster — was dwarfed by these other steps, at least for Republicans.

Democrats also expressed higher support for measures to expand voting access, including making it easier to register to vote (29% vs. 14% of Republicans), creating more and more accessible polling places (22% vs. 11% Republicans), and making mail-in voting more widespread (21% vs. 7% Republicans).

Laws to guard against ballot harvesting (where one person can gather and turn in multiple people's ballots) are also reassuring to many voters.

And, once again, allowing nonpartisan election observers to monitor polling stations can also increase voting confidence. Except for 12 states, most parts of the country do this — so the public doesn't have to only rely on partisan election observers.

Does more need to be done? It appears so, since significant percentages of voters say in our Deseret News Harris X poll deny that "the United States has the necessary legal and legislative mechanisms in place to successfully adjudicate disagreement over election results or not" — with 47% of Republicans, 35% of independents and 19% of Democrats stating the U.S. does not have sufficient mechanisms.

A debate across America One person who knows plenty about these conversations is former Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers, a Latter-day Saint man who found himself in the middle of a political lightning storm when he was asked by former President Trump (who he had voted for) to support the installation of an alternative slate of electors.

"I know there's a deep state ... I know you're cheating" one man recently screamed at him — unwilling to hear any of his explanations. "No matter what you tell someone like this, it doesn't matter," Bowers said.

"When I look at that I just think — how close we are to just mayhem," he told Deseret News.

In Bowers telling, what voters really need in order to increase their trust in elections are not sweeping changes to the structural system — but rather, education on what's already in place. Are people willing to sacrifice their time or an "untested opinion" to learn more?

"You need to really want to know," Bowers said — and for anyone who answers in the affirmative, he's been sharing as much as he can with students, concerned citizens and legislators. "You really want to know? I'll go through the whole thing" he tells people.

In Arizona, the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center has put out a virtual tour of its process. I get my own glimpse into the 102 steps Bowers explains are taken to ensure election integrity in this crucial swing state. That starts with the "time you walk in and get your voting card" to "how the tabulation takes place, to how it's packaged, who picks it up, how it's transported with a deputy sheriff's officer, brought to a loading dock and verified, with tamper approved seal, and signature approved tags."

If the mark on a ballot isn't clear, Bowers pointed out, a digital photograph of the ballot is brought up on the screen so that adjudicators from both parties can "review it together" — with a third person independently acting as a "tie breaker" if needed.

"There are checks all the way through this thing" — a system that has "been developed over three decades," he said.

"We've been voting by mail by 30 years," he added. "And we've been using digital checking of signatures for a decade."

In honing this system, Bowers pointed out, speed and accuracy need to be balanced — since some measures that could legitimately increase security further (like adding another flap to the envelopes) can add additional time (six seconds of election worker time per ballot, in the case of that one new flap), which adds up and delays results significantly (which also impacts trust).

Once most people see how many protective steps there are, Bowers said, they can see that bad actors are "not smart enough" to break the system.

Despite these safeguards, Arizona received 289 complaints of cheating in the previous presidential election (out of more than 1.5 million voters in the state) — representing all the allegations of "things that went wrong." For instance, one man was accused of voting six times, a vote was claimed to come from a vacant address and there were concerns that 32 people had voted from a single address.

So, the Arizona Legislature invested between $3 million and $4 million to address "every single" charge and concern. Out of 289 complaints, they were able to verify nine cases of cheating, Bowers said, which involved 15 ballots total (six of which were fraudulent). Out of those nine cases, three resulted in convictions, including one woman in Yuma who voted three times and was charged and sentenced.

Judge Thomas Griffith, a former judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, brought together a group of experienced conservatives to do an independent examination of the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. The final report, titled " Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election ," reveals that a small number of fraudulent instances, such as those observed in Arizona, could in no way sway an election as a whole.