Trust in US elections wavers. Why it’s still higher than you think.

Episode transcript

Gail Chaddock: For the past several months, the Monitor has focused some attention on a project called Rebuilding Trust. It’s a critical theme in many realms, but nowhere more so than in U.S. politics – and at no time more critical than in the run-up to a presidential election.

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Chaddock: “This is Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking with Peter Grier, the Monitor’s senior staff writer based in Washington for the last 45 years, an astonishing record of achievement that we’ll talk about more in next week’s podcast. 

Peter, thank you for joining us.

Peter Grier: Certainly, Gail.

Chaddock: Polls for the last 20 years are documenting that Americans are losing trust in the Supreme Court, in American political parties, and each other. In April, you wrote a story headlined, “How America lost trust in elections – and why that matters.” Why did you write this story now? 

Grier: We’re in an unusual period in American political history where one party has much lower numbers in the polls for their trust in elections. Usually, things bounce back and even out after a few years. That’s not happening right now. 

Chaddock: Was there a “golden era” when Americans all trusted their elections?

Grier: That’s a good question. You know, most of the modern study of this dates from the year 2000, which was, of course, the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision which basically settled the very close race between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Since then, trust follows a zigzag pattern. When your candidate loses, for instance, after Al Gore lost that election, Democrats’ trust in elections plunged, according to the polls, Republicans’ rose. But it switches when the parties switch places in the Oval Office. In the Clinton and Obama eras, Democratic trust rose and Republican trust plummeted. When Trump won, Republican trust skyrocketed, Democratic trust lowered. But Republican trust didn’t go up as much as it really should have according to political science. And since then, the constant attack on elections from former President Trump has kept Republican trust much lower, much longer than it should have, basically, according to the bounce pattern. 

Chaddock: You cite in this story the ever quotable William “Boss” Tweed, the head of the Tammany machine in New York in the progressive era. He said, “I don’t think there ever was an honest election in the city of New York.”

Grier: In some ways, attacks on today’s election system, find a fertile ground because there is a history of American elections being not what we call entirely on the up and up. But that was a different era when it was much easier to do that kind of thing. American elections are much more professionally run now. There is fraud. But the difference is there’s not fraud on a scale that could change an election, especially on the national level, because it takes a lot of votes, and it’s a lot of work, and it would involve a lot of people. The conspiracy involved is really beyond the ability of typical people to organize. In that sense, I think our memories of the battle days when people bought votes with barrels of beer and a job is a bit of a misnomer.

Chaddock: You know, one of the things that always bothered me as a journalist, having to write tomorrow about issues like, are elections fair, with the evidence at hand. You read books like Robert Caro’s opus on LBJ. And he’s dug up all sorts of things about elections in that period, finding votes that had been cast in alphabetical order, for example. Suspected but not known at the time. Do we really have all the information we need to come to a conclusion on these issues right now in the middle or just after an election? 

Grier: So, how do we not know there was fraud? Or how do we know there’s not fraud? If someone can bring me any evidence of that, I’d be happy to look at it. Nowadays, they cry fraud first and look for fraud later. And nowadays we have election officials from both parties saying that our elections are fair and honest. That’s a different situation, I think, than the LBJ era. 

Chaddock: I love the end of your piece, where you talk about the task of rebuilding trust, and note that there are some within the Republican Party who haven’t bought into election denialism. And you see that as a kind of positive element for going forward. 

Grier: We definitely have picked up on that in the sense that election denialism may not be as deeply ingrained in the voting population as it would appear to be from the way the elite of the Republican Party goes along with the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. That’s because many of the elite don’t believe it either. And they go along with it because they’re afraid of Mr. Trump’s ability to sway votes. An interesting aspect of trust in elections is that most people are pretty trusting about their own election. In other words, you ask them: “Is your vote going to be freely and fairly counted?” You get large majorities that say yes it is. “So why do you not trust elections?” “Well, it’s those people in Texas, or it’s those people in California, and particularly it’s those people in Detroit and Chicago and urban areas.”

Chaddock: I had to laugh when I read that in your story, because when I was an education writer for the Monitor, exactly the same thing showed up in polling on education. When people were asked if they thought education in the United States was good. “Oh, it was terrible.” And then they were asked, how about education for your own kids. “Great, wonderful teachers.” So, this is a kind of general state of thought. I’m wondering if you have an explanation for it. I could never figure it out. 

Grier: Well, I think that trust doesn’t really mean trust. I think that the word trust stands in for a lot of complex feelings about the larger processes we engage in, at least in this instance. So, when you say you don’t trust an election, I don’t think it necessarily means only or entirely that: “Well, we think that the vote was fake.” It means, also: “I don’t like what happened.” It means: “I was uncomfortable.” But it doesn’t always just mean: “Well, that person just stuffed the ballot box.” And you’ve got to separate the intertwined emotions that people have about the result of an election. 

Chaddock: That’s a really interesting point, especially when you think about questions like, there are many Republicans now who are looking at indictments and trials going on for their leading candidate, and seeing it not as no man is above the law, but that this is an effort to rig this election, and we don’t trust it.

Grier: Yes, that means a lot of things. As I said, it means they really don’t like it. They think it’s unfair. Does it really mean they think there’s a conspiracy to do it? I don’t know. Some of them do, but I don’t think all of them do. 

Chaddock: What does rebuilding trust look like? 

Grier: There’s a guy who runs the MIT election lab, which studies how elections are run, named Charles Stewart. Only half jokingly, he says the only way to increase trust in elections is for your candidate to win, or for the line to be a little shorter. So he says the only other real driver of negativity about elections is, as I said, being uncomfortable, having to stand in a long line to cast your vote. 

He said we can’t aim to have trust in elections, because people are always upset when their candidate loses. We have to have trustworthy elections. That’s different. And by that he means an election that a reasonable person would say was fair and honest.

I think the other consensus point is that there is one great way to address the trustworthiness of elections, and that’s to talk about them. American elections, you’ve got to remember, are a real Rube Goldberg sort of operation. Unlike many democracies, ours are not run by the nation. American elections are all run by individual states. So you have many different systems with many different kinds of ballots, many different kinds of machines, many different schedules. One lesson that a lot of election officials have taken away from the 2020 election is that a lot of things happened that weren’t really explained. Because it was a pandemic, rules changed. There were drop boxes where there had never been drop boxes before. The amount of time you had to ask for and deliver a mail-in ballot was extended. People didn’t understand that. And many people didn’t like it. And that’s what they don’t trust. 

But, what they found is that Americans are reasonable when you explain it to them. A number of secretaries of state in different states now authorize tours of their election systems. They’ll bring in groups like a church group, or a school group, and they’ll go: “And this is how we do it. This is how we make sure there aren’t people going around just grabbing ballots off people’s doorstops and changing them to their preferred candidate.” And when they do that, they find that actually to be a very powerful way to increase the way people feel about the electoral process. 

Chaddock: That’s an interesting story. 

Grier: Also, they always say that even if something maybe doesn’t make much of a difference, if people like it, it might be a good change to make. For instance ballot ID, which is, you have to show a picture ID to vote. There are some Democrats who believe that actually suppresses the vote, because not everybody has an ID. But in general, studies show that they’re not sure it suppresses the vote. Or at least not as much as it can increase the vote from people who are otherwise a little mistrustful. So, ballot ID is in fact spreading in the states. Kentucky recently passed a bill that implemented that, signed by a Democratic governor. 

Chaddock: One of the trends in journalism is the desert of local news. There are a lot of efforts to fund the revival of it. But even localities that appear to have a local paper often don’t have a local correspondent. It’s a local paper that picks up wire copy and so forth. Without a vibrant local press, and localities tend to be not as polarized as the national leaderships are, is the message of trust more difficult to get through to people? 

Grier: You do generally trust what happens to your own ballot. But there used to be, the old saying used to be all politics are local, from Tip O’Neill. Well that’s not really true anymore. Now all politics is national. The rise of polarized parties, the closeness of the current balance between the parties, and the rise of the Trump era, which is undeniably more in your face than past years, has made national politics the driver for people’s opinions about a lot of things dealing with politics in general.

And that’s part of the reason that local journalism is dying. People have unfortunately become less interested in their own communities. It’s too bad that we don’t have our local papers, but it’s also too bad that we don’t have more people standing for places like the school board, which in many localities, you know, they have to beat the bushes to find people to run. 

Chaddock: Interesting research going on about the pressure to get Trump Republicans into all of those precinct jobs that no one ever wanted before, and that that has happened, is happening, and what a difference that can make in this sense of local as being inherently nonpartisan. I see it in the little town I live in. You know, we never used to know whether the selectmen leaned Republican or leaned Democratic. But the Republican Party has started sending out emails in the last election informing us who was leaning Republican and who was leaning Democrat, something that was never known before.

Grier: One thing you’ll find about that is when you bring those people, opponents of what you’re doing into the system, some of them will maintain their beliefs and leak your stuff to their partisan media and criticize you still. But many of them also figure out that you’re not wrong and switch and become helpers in the system. In our big city, we have many local issues like bike lanes or school and apartment extensions that’ll split neighborhoods. And my wife’s heavily involved in local politics. And we find that when a group really hates something, the best thing to do is to go: “Okay, well, you can serve on the Neighborhood Commission as well.” A lot of times, those people become the next generation of stalwarts who are supporting the neighborhood government. 

Chaddock: Another group that’s often targeted for mistrust from the public is the media. Peter, how do you as a reporter and how does the Monitor work to establish a sense of trust with its readers. 

Grier: I think we’ve always tried to be trustworthy, by addressing both sides of an issue. And the phrase I like, which I heard recently from a younger colleague, was: “Let’s be thorough.” I don’t want to necessarily say I’m balanced on both sides. Because the truth isn’t always balanced on both sides, but if I’m thorough. I can get at the truth.

Chaddock: It’s a good word.

Grier: Trustworthy media admits its mistakes. If you read a newspaper, or watch a TV show or listen to a podcast, that will discuss its errors and admit its own doubt. I would trust that a lot more than one that told you: “This is the way it is.”

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Chaddock: Peter, thank you for joining us for this podcast. 

Grier: Any time, Gail. 

Chaddock: And thanks to our listeners. Come back next week for a retrospective on a storied 45-year Monitor career, again with Peter Grier. You can find more, including our show notes, with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins, Jingnan Peng, and Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineers are Alyssa Britton and Jeff Turton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.