Abstract
State election officials play a unique role in the information ecosystem of American elections. They operate largely as information leaders, educating the public about how to vote, but can also serve as a form opinion leaders, shaping voters’ attitudes towards election administration. In this paper, we merge a novel dataset of social media use by state election offices during the 2022 election cycle with two nationally representative surveys fielded before and after the election to evaluate the impacts of state EOs on voters’ information-seeking behavior and attitudes towards election administration. Specifically, we evaluate whether EOs’ trust-building social media campaigns motivate voters to look to them as sources of election information, and shape prospective and retrospective voter attitudes about ballot accuracy. In states where state EOs shared trust-building messages during the early weeks of the general election cycle, voters were more likely to look to these officials for information about how to register and vote. Comparing voter confidence at the state level before and after the election, our findings suggest trust-building messages by EOs help voters identify them as information leaders about how to vote, but that voters may require more time to view EOs as opinion leaders about ballot accuracy in their state. Our research has important implications for understanding how state EOs can connect with voters and build statewide voter confidence at comparable rates to confidence at the personal and local levels.