Explaining election safeguards on camera raised trust in other states' elections by 10 to 12.5 points

Each sample was asked about a state its members do not vote in. Texans and Georgians watched videos about California's safeguards, Colorado and Los Angeles County participants watched videos about Texas, and the national sample was split between the two ^[5]. So the gains cannot be put down to voters warming to their own county clerk.

Voters typically know little about how elections are run in other states, and partisan distrust fills the space: Republicans nationwide were less likely to trust elections in California, Democrats less confident in Texas ^[8][7]. After the videos, trust in the targeted state rose by an average of 10 to 12.5 percentage points, among Republicans, Democrats and independents ^[6]. An earlier round of this work had already shown that simple factual videos raise trust in elections generally ^[9].

"You can move people on this by giving them the facts," Gaudette said ^[10].

The follow-up tested whether the production budget matters. Gaudette sat in her car and recorded herself on her phone, vertical, stating two things: voting machines are not connected to the internet, and ballot counting has bipartisan oversight ^[11]. More than 8,000 Americans saw either that clip, a professionally produced video from election officials in Dane County, Wisconsin, or Maricopa County, Arizona, or no video at all ^[12]. Trust rose about as much after the homemade clip as after the professional ones ^[13], and the people who watched it were 8 to 9 percentage points more likely to correctly remember the two facts ^[14].

The format split by age. Among respondents 18 to 24, 3 percent called the informal video misleading; among those 55 and older, 15 percent did ^[15], five times the rate ^[17].

The delay result is the thinner part of the record. "If election officials explain why a delay might occur in advance, then voters are less likely to have a negative response," said Jennifer Gaudette, an assistant professor in the UC Riverside School of Public Policy and co-author of the work in the Election Law Journal ^[2][1]. The paper does not give an effect size for that message ^[19]. Related work appeared in the British Journal of Political Science in 2025 and PNAS Nexus in 2024 ^[3].

The outcome measured in all of this is stated trust in a survey, taken after watching, with no re-measurement later ^[20]. That leaves the question an election office actually faces unanswered: whether a two-fact video watched in September still holds in November, when the count is slow and someone with a large following says so. Across the two experiments, more than 23,000 people were surveyed ^[18], all of them answering questions inside a survey panel.

"State and local officials should work hard to communicate to people on a variety of platforms because social media is where many of these claims explode," Gaudette said. "They should explain how our ballots are kept secure, how vote counting works, and why it can sometimes lead to delays" ^[16].