The forthcoming article “Can citizen election observation increase public confidence in US elections?” by Jennie Barker, Oren Samet, and Susan D. Hyde is summarized by the author(s) below.
Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections in the United States, a significant portion of voters across party lines lack confidence in the electoral process. False claims of fraud following the 2020 presidential election primed millions of Americans to view electoral results with suspicion, and distrust has persisted since. Scholars and practitioners alike have sought out ways to help rebuild confidence in elections, particularly among those most skeptical.
In this study, we seek to contribute to this effort by drawing on lessons from abroad, examining the potential effects of a practice is common in many contexts around the world but largely unknown in the United States: nonpartisan citizen election observation. Nonpartisan observers—trained citizens who monitor polling places, ballot counting, and the overall electoral process—have played an important role in bolstering the credibility of elections, particularly in developing democracies.
To assess whether the effects might travel to the United States, we fielded a series of survey experiments that randomized whether participants received information about positive assessments of elections from nonpartisan citizen observers. Some of these surveys focused on a hypothetical election scenario, in which respondents’ preferred candidate lost, roughly mirroring the 2020 outcome. In another, we leveraged a real observation mission conducted by The Carter Center during the 2022 midterms in Fulton County, Georgia. Fulton County has been a focal point of contested election narratives, and the Carter Center’s mission, which functioned as a pilot for this kind of initiative, provided an ideal real-world test case of nonpartisan citizen observation’s potential.
Overall, the results offer reasons for cautious optimism. Learning that nonpartisan observers had monitored the election and affirmed its integrity increased respondents’ confidence in the results and the electoral process consistently across all surveys, including for elections in a county that has been a repeated subject of electoral disinformation and controversy. In the context of the hypothetical election scenario, it also made respondents more likely to acknowledge that the officially declared winner actually won. Importantly, these effects held across partisan lines, including among Republicans, the partisan group most distrustful of elections overall.
The intervention appeared to work primarily by resolving uncertainty, rather than converting the most hardened skeptics. But in a polarized environment, uncertain voters constitute an important audience, and building confidence among them is foundational to democratic resilience. Amidst rising concerns about the long-term health of U.S. democracy, our results suggest that the United States might be able to learn and benefit from election-related innovations in other countries.
About the Author(s): Jennie Barker is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Oren Samet is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University, and Susan D. Hyde is the Kernan Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Institute of International Studies. Their research “Can citizen election observation increase public confidence in US elections?” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.