Jennifer Gaudette sat in her car, pointed her cellphone at her own face, and hit record. No lights, no studio, no crew — just a researcher explaining two simple facts about how votes stay safe: voting machines are never connected to the internet, and counting ballots happens under bipartisan oversight. That low-budget clip, she found, could change minds just as powerfully as slick, professionally produced videos — and people remembered it better.
The finding is part of a wave of research showing that rebuilding trust in American elections may be far simpler than we think. In studies co-authored by Gaudette, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside's School of Public Policy, researchers set out to test a stubborn problem. America's elections are run differently in every state, and voters often know almost nothing about how voting works outside their own borders. That gap becomes a breeding ground for suspicion. Republicans nationwide distrusted elections in heavily Democratic California, for instance, while Democrats doubted the integrity of Republican-led Texas.
The team's answer was strikingly basic: just explain things. In survey experiments involving nearly 15,000 people — drawn from a national sample plus Texas, Georgia, Colorado, and Los Angeles County — participants watched short videos produced by election officials describing the safeguards that protect ballots. Texans and Georgians watched messages about California elections; Coloradans and Angelenos watched videos about Texas. Afterward, trust in elections in the targeted states jumped by an average of 10 to 12.5 percentage points. And the gains crossed party lines. Republicans grew more trusting of Democratic states, Democrats grew more trusting of Republican states, and independents improved too.
"This tells us partisan distrust of election security isn't necessarily set in stone," Gaudette said. "You can move people on this by giving them the facts."
The research, published in the Election Law Journal, the British Journal of Political Science, and PNAS Nexus, carries a practical message for the thousands of state and local officials who run American elections. In a follow-up study with more than 8,000 participants, Gaudette's homemade car-seat video produced trust gains on par with official productions from Dane County, Wisconsin, and Maricopa County, Arizona. It was also more memorable: viewers of the informal clip were 8 to 9 percentage points more likely to correctly recall the two security facts. Younger adults were especially receptive — only 3% of 18-to-24-year-olds found the informal video misleading, versus 15% of those 55 and older.
Gaudette's advice to officials is straightforward: meet people where they already are. "Social media is where many of these claims explode," she said. "They should explain how our ballots are kept secure, how vote counting works, and why it can sometimes lead to delays." If explaining a delay beforehand softens the blow, then honesty itself becomes a shield — no Hollywood budget required.