Voter trust in U.S. elections drops amid Trump critiques, redistricting, fear of ICE

President Trump and his allies are questioning ballot box security. Democrats warn of unconstitutional federal intervention. Experts and others raise concerns about partisan redistricting and federal immigration agents intimidating people at the polls.

Meanwhile, voters’ confidence in the upcoming midterm elections has fallen sharply across party lines, according to new research from the UC San Diego Center for Transparent and Trustworthy Elections.

Of the 11,406 eligible voters surveyed between mid-December and mid-January, only 60% said they were confident their midterm votes would be counted fairly. That was down from 77% of those who had confidence in vote counting shortly after the 2024 presidential election.

Thad Kousser, co-director of the center, said changes in voter confidence are common after elections, with voters in winning parties generally expressing more confidence, while voters in losing parties expressing less confidence. But he said the new survey revealed double-digit, overall declines in trust last year.

Such declines in trust and fears of voter intimidation are troubling and raise serious questions about voter turnout in a pivotal midterm election that could radically reshape American politics, voting experts say.

While 82 percent of Republicans expressed at least some confidence in the vote count after Trump’s victory in 2024, only 65 percent said they felt that way in the latest poll. According to the survey, trust among Democrats fell from 77 percent to 64 percent, and among independents it fell from 73 percent to 57 percent.

“Everyone — Democrats, Republicans, independents — has become less confident in elections in the last year,” Kousser said, calling it “a parallel movement in this polarized age.”

Kousser’s co-chair, Lauren Prather, said what’s causing these declines varies widely from party to party, with half of Republicans citing distrust of mail-in voting and non-citizen voting and concern that eligible voters may be unable to cast ballots due to fear or intimidation, said nearly a quarter of Democrats.

Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting contributes to widespread fraud and that noncitizen voting is a major problem in U.S. elections, although neither claim is supported by evidence.

Many Democratic leaders and voting experts have expressed concerns about voter disenfranchisement and intimidation, based in part on Republican efforts to implement stricter voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements, and Trump has suggested his party should “take over” elections across the country.

Others in Trump’s orbit have suggested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be deployed at polling places, and the FBI recently raided and seized ballots in Fulton County, Ga., the target of Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

Prather said research has long shown that “elite cues,” or messages from political leaders, are important in shaping the public’s perception of election security and integrity, so it’s no surprise that the concerns voiced by Trump and other party elites are also being voiced by voters.

But he said the poll also revealed more bipartisan concerns.

Voters of all backgrounds, including 51 percent of Democrats, 48 ​​percent of independents and 34 percent of Republicans, said they do not trust congressional districts to be drawn in a way that fairly reflects what voters want. They primarily blamed the other party for the problem, but nearly a quarter of both Democrats and Republicans also expressed dissatisfaction with their own party leaders, according to the poll.

Several states embarked on unprecedented redistricting in the middle of the decade to win more congressional seats for their parties; Republicans gained the advantage in states like Texas, while Democrats gained the advantage in states like California.

Voters of all backgrounds, including 44 percent of Democrats, 34 percent of independents and 30 percent of Republicans, said they believed ICE agents would be present at polling places in their area but disagreed with the results.

Half of Democrats said such a presence would make them feel less confident that their district’s votes would be counted accurately, while less than 14% said it would make them feel more confident. 48 percent of Republicans said it would make them more confident, while about 8 percent said it would make them less confident. Among independents, 19% said it was safer and 32% said it was less safe.

Perceptions of ICE at polling places also vary by race; 42% of Asian American voters, 38% of Hispanic voters, 29% of white voters and 28% of Black voters said it would make them feel less safe, while 18% of Asian American voters, 24% of Hispanic voters, 27% of white voters and 21% of Black voters said it would make them feel safer.

46% of both Black and Hispanic voters said they expected to be intimidated when voting, compared to 35% of Asian American voters and just 10% of white voters. Meanwhile, 31% of Hispanic and Asian American voters, 21% of Black voters and 8% of white voters said they were particularly concerned about being questioned by ICE agents at the polls.

A man waits in line to vote at Compton College in November.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

Kousser said this cycle’s voter distrust reflects a remarkable moment in American politics, when political rhetoric caused widespread distrust not just in election results but also in the underlying structure and fairness of how votes are collected and counted—even though those structures have been tested and proven.

“We’re at a point right now where there are people on both sides questioning what the objective conditions of the election will be — whether people will be able to go to the polls freely, what the vote counting mechanisms will be — and that’s a real left, right and center kind of thing in American politics today,” he said.

Prather said research in other countries has shown that distrust in elections over time can cause voters to stop voting, especially if they think their votes won’t be counted fairly. He doesn’t think the United States has reached that point, as evidenced by high turnout in recent elections, but it’s a longer-term risk.

Prather said ICE deployments could have a more immediate impact “especially among groups that have concerns about what it might mean for them to show up if they expect ICE or federal agents to be there.”

Election experts said voters with concerns should take steps to ensure their votes are counted, including double-checking that they are registered and making a plan to vote by mail or early with family and friends if they worry about being intimidated.

If voters have concerns about the integrity of the election, what they should not do, they said, is decide not to vote.

“The No. 1 item on my list will always be: Voting,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “This may sound trite or simplistic, but the only way we can hold on to our democracy is if people continue to participate, continue to trust it, and continue to believe in it.”

Registrar voter staff processes ballots at the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana in November.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“Now is the time to buckle up and figure out how to strengthen our protections for fair elections and not give in to the chaos and believe that it is somehow overwhelming,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Project on Preserving Democracy at UCLA Law.

“I don’t want people to feel like nothing is working, everything is overwhelming, and they’re paralyzed by all the news about these attacks and threats,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project. “There are a lot of people working to make sure this election goes as smoothly as possible, and we are ready to respond if anything comes up.”

Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant in California, said the erosion of confidence in U.S. elections was a “deliberate strategy” that Trump employed for years to explain away legitimate election losses that embarrassed him and was facilitated by Republicans in Congress who did not want to check Trump’s lies to defend U.S. election integrity.

But Madrid said Democrats have compounded the problem and become “the monster they’re fighting” by gerrymandering blue states through redistricting measures like California’s Proposition 50, further eroding America’s confidence in elections.

Madrid said it still expected high turnout in the by-elections because many voters “have the feeling that the crisis is existential for the future, that literally everything is at stake” but that the loss of confidence is a serious problem.

“Without that trust, a form of government like democracy — at least the American form of democracy — doesn’t work,” he said.

Trump – who In a post on Friday Calling Democrats “terrible, disingenuous CHEATERS” for opposing voter ID laws that most Americans support, Trump has long appealed to his supporters to vote en masse to give him the largest possible margin of victory as a buffer against any election being rigged against him. One of his 2024 campaign slogans was “Too Big for the Rig.”

In recent days, some of Trump’s harshest critics, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), have taken a similar tone to Democrats.

In an interview with The Times, Schiff said he was “deeply concerned” about the midterm elections, given all of Trump’s threats, but said voters needed to understand that “the remedy here is to be more involved, not less.”

“The best protection we will have is the most intense voter turnout we have ever had,” he said. “Those who will save this country will be the voters who have the most important title in our system.”