Commentary
American democracy has faced a crisis of trust in elections, fueled by denialism and movements like “Stop the Steal”. Former Maricopa County recorder and Ash Senior Practice Fellow, Stephen Richer, outlines a potential solution in election administration by offering election facility tours. Finding that witnessing the election process firsthand significantly boosted trust in its integrity, highlighting transparency as a key tool to rebuild voter confidence.
In recent years, American democracy has suffered from declining confidence in election administration, from general election denialism to the “Stop the Steal” movement. In its most extreme expression, this distrust in election results led to the violent Capitol riots on January 6, 2021.
Can election administrators rebuild some of this confidence by showing voters exactly how elections work? Can greater transparency, such as providing election facility tours, help strengthen American democracy?
As the elected Maricopa County recorder — the chief election officer for Maricopa County, Arizona, the second largest voting jurisdiction in the United States — from 2021-2024, I worked to address these concerns firsthand. Recently, I partnered with Professors Thad Kousser and Lauren Prather, both of UC San Diego, to explore the impact of facility tours on voter confidence. Based on our research, the answer is to these questions is likely yes.
Over the course of 2024, Kousser, Prather, and I surveyed 329 Arizonans — 148 Democrats and 76 Republicans — who toured the Maricopa County election facility with an experienced election professional. We asked participants to rate their confidence in the election process before and after the tour.
The outcome was clear: voter trust increased.
Before the tour, we asked (but did not require) participants to scan a QR code and then complete a short survey. After the tour, we asked them to take it again. This mechanism provided Kousser and Prather with valuable data to analyze. As shown in the graph below, the average participant confidence level before the tour was 3.63 out of 4, with 1 being XX and 4 being YY. After the tour, that number rose to 3.86. Notably, we made especially significant strides with Republicans, increasing their average confidence level from 3.14 on average to 3.58
Throughout my tenure as Maricopa County recorder, my office regularly interacted with Arizonans who distrusted the 2020 election results and remained skeptical going into the 2022 and 2024 general elections.
We tried many things to improve voter confidence, including public tours of our election facility. The tours typically lasted 1.5 to 2 hours, during which we gave participants an in-depth look at the election process. We showed them the machines we used to tabulate ballots, with exposed wiring to demonstrate that the tabulator is connected to an outside source (see image below). Participants also had the opportunity to test-perform signature verification, an important step in the vote-by-mail process. Additionally, they observed how ballots are extracted from their return envelopes, where results are securely stored (see image below), how we communicated with voting locations, where bipartisan observers oversaw the process, and more.
And we welcomed questions, no matter how critical or skeptical.
My office invited the public to take tours, and we accommodated private requests. We did not screen participants based on any characteristic, and in 2024 alone, we provided tours to over 1,000 people.
Historically, voter confidence has been tied to election outcomes. If the Republican candidate won the presidency, then Republican confidence rose while Democratic confidence fell, and vice versa (see, for example, Reller, Anderson, and Kousser; Anderson, Blais, Bowler, Donovan, and Listhaug). Scholars refer to this as the “winner-loser gap.”
However, the 2020 election caused Republican distrust to decline well past the typical winner-loser gap, both in depth and duration. Since then, election administrators have tried all manner of things to rebuild confidence, including facility tours, educational videos, articles, town halls, equipment demonstrations, mailers, advertisements, virtual reality experiences, chatbots, and more. All the while, academics have been busy assessing the effectiveness of these efforts.
For example, Bush and Prather studied the impact of international election monitors. Gaudette, Hill, Kousser, Lockhart, and Romero investigated the effectiveness of 30-second video messages from election officials. Suttmann-Lea and Merivaki examined the use of social media by election officials. Carey, Fogarty, Nyhan, and Reifler compared the effectiveness of pre-bunking communications strategies versus corrective communications. And Stewart tested a number of confidence-building efforts.
Public confidence in election administration rose significantly after the 2024 election. This could be because President Trump didn’t claim widespread fraud, as he did in 2020, or it could be because Vice President Harris quickly conceded. It may also reflect the impact of the above-described efforts of election officials — or it could be a combination of all three. As we prepare for the 2026 and 2028 elections, continued research into what drives voter confidence and restores faith in democracy will be critical.
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Stephen Richer is the former county recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona and is a Senior Practice fellow at the Ash Center of Democratic Governance and Innovation. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Ash Center or its affiliates.
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