Abstract
Post-election audits are thought to bolster voters’ confidence in elections, but it is unclear which aspects of audits drive public trust in election results and why. In a set of survey experiments fielded by YouGov to a sample of 2,000 Americans, we used both factorial and conjoint designs to understand which attributes of election audits are most important for increasing voter confidence in legitimate election results. Overall, we find that what an audit finds is much less important than how the audit is conducted, so long as the audit does not uncover exceptionally large errors. Structural features of the audit, like who conducts it and how its results are announced, turn out to be more consequential to voter evaluations of election results than the actual number of discrepancies found. Although voters are quick to pick up partisan cues about audits, this has not produced a broader polarization around election audits, and voters rationally do not punish an election in which the winner was called correctly for a few mis-counted votes. Our findings suggest that election administrators can bolster voter confidence through the design of election audits, without serious fear that turning up small numbers of errors will harm voter confidence.