Confidence that US votes are counted as intended has fallen 22 points since the 2024 election

The fall since the 2024 election totals 22 points, and 17 of them were gone before the January 2026 survey ^[1][2]. The remaining five came between January and September ^[3]. Averaged across each interval, confidence dropped about 1.2 points a month in the 14 months to January and about 0.6 a month in the eight months since ^[5].

The second leg is not spread evenly across the electorate. Republican confidence went from 65% to 58% over those eight months, a seven-point move ^[6][3]. The account of the survey does not report a margin of error ^[18], so the one-point Democratic change cannot be separated from sampling noise. UC San Diego calls the independent decline the particularly pronounced one ^[4].

Thad Kousser, a professor of political science at UC San Diego, co-directs the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections. "Democrats, Republicans and independents all express doubts, although what drives those doubts can be very different," he said ^[9]. The center's January survey had already documented the decline in all three partisan groups ^[7].

Respondents also named reasons for their distrust. Forty-four percent pointed to the way congressional district lines are drawn, 41% to whether US elections are protected against foreign interference, and 39% to whether voting technology is protected against cyberattacks ^[13]. A single cross-sectional survey cannot assign the 22-point fall to any of them. Those answers were collected in the same interview as the confidence question.

Concern about AI runs in the same direction in every partisan group. Asked whether AI will be mostly beneficial or mostly harmful in the midterms, Republicans chose harmful by 2.6 to 1, Democrats by 3.4 to 1 and independents by 4.1 to 1 ^[11]. Lauren Prather is the center's other co-director and an associate professor at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy. "Our findings show broad concern about AI-generated misinformation and foreign interference, even among voters who may disagree strongly about other aspects of how elections are conducted," she said ^[14].

The center reports these views as firmly held: 89% of respondents said they were at least moderately certain about their level of confidence ^[8]. That threshold puts the moderately certain in with the highly certain, so it does not show how many respondents hold their view strongly.