Abstract
What does it take to make American voters feel more confident in the electoral process? Recent work has explored questions along these lines, assessing voter trust as a function of information diets, endorsements of the electoral process by co-partisan elites, past experiences, modes of voting, and election outcomes. We investigate whether public opinion about the accuracy and security of elections in America are anchored by how much is spent on them. Applying this “price-quality” heuristic to the context of elections, we specifically test whether increased funding for elections increases voter confidence. Using a preregistered survey experiment fielded by YouGov on a sample of 2,000 American voters, we provide novel insights into what voters know about
the sources of election funding, how they evaluate the competing fiscal demands of local governments, how they prioritize various tasks of election administration, and their support for proposals to increase elections funding. To our knowledge, this study represents the first instance in which such questions have been asked in an experimental context. The overall pattern of results suggest that voters are generally misinformed about how elections are funded; voters are divided on how election administrators can improve elections; and while voters generally view current levels of spending on election
as excessive and are not motivated to broadly increase funding, spending on elections nevertheless factors into evaluations of election quality. Taken together, these findings shed light on what voters think about election administration and the capacity for money to shape attitudes about the electoral process.