Summary
This paper looks at the role of federalism in increasing polarization and how that relates to perceptions of trust in elections. It empirically shows that many people do not trust the elections in states with different partisan policies, despite elections being run much the same way across those states (e.g. Californians less likely to trust Texas elections, Texans are less likely to trust California elections). With this baseline, the paper details an experiment the authors conducted to evaluate whether messaging from one state about election integrity increases the trust in that state’s elections in a different state. Videos of election officials discussing election integrity were shown to voters from California, Georgia, Colorado, and Texas, and the study found that those videos increased citizen confidence in elections of other states, regardless of partisan identification. The report provides the data from the research to support this and then makes recommendations based on these results.