News release

From: AAAS

Public information campaign mostly fails to enhance trust in elections for skeptical U.S. conservative voters

A public information campaign designed to increase trust in elections did not increase turnout or general confidence in elections, nor did it reduce beliefs about how often non-citizens vote illegally, among conservative voters in Texas. These findings, from a field experiment conducted during the 2024 U.S. presidential election and now newly analyzed by Thad Kousser and colleagues, contrast with the large positive effects of similar informational messages found in recent survey experiments. Although many states launched election trust campaigns following the 2020 U.S. presidential election, it has been unclear whether such campaigns work outside survey experiments, particularly among voters skeptical about election integrity.  Kousser et al. studied a randomized field experiment that targeted roughly 148,000 voters in the Houston, Texas metropolitan area who were identified by a machine learning model as conservatives likely to be skeptical of election administration. From late September through the final days before the November election, roughly half of these voters were randomly assigned to receive online videos, text messages, cable television spots, display ads, and postcards describing how public officials enforce the laws that safeguard Texas elections. Turnout was measured for all participants, while trust was measured for a subset of about 6,400 voters surveyed a month after the campaign began. While the messaging did not increase most measures of trust, the researchers did find that the campaign may have increased trust in the vote-by-mail process by a small amount.