Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, researchers found that fewer than half of Americans expect to see free and fair elections.
A recent survey from the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections asked 5,000 people if they expect the upcoming midterm elections to be “free and fair,” and only 49% answered yes.
The Center has been surveying Americans about trust in elections since 2022. Trust has declined significantly from a relative high point after the 2024 election, when 77% of respondents said they were “somewhat” or “very” confident that votes were counted accurately.
By January 2026, that assessment dropped to 60% and fell again to just 55% among respondents in the recent survey conducted in September.
Trust among Republicans and Independents declined more than among Democrats, but all three groups trust elections less now than they did after the 2024 election.
“We’re in a unique moment in American politics when you even have to survey people about whether they think there’ll be free and fair elections,” Thad Kousser, co-director of the Center, said during a webinar discussing the survey.
Sources of skepticism, however, varied significantly between partisan groups, the survey found.
Fifty-three percent of Republicans feared that mail ballots would not be counted accurately, versus just 19% of Democrats; and 52% of Republicans believed that noncitizens could be voting, compared with 12% of Democrats.
President Trump has repeatedly lied about winning the 2020 election. He’s claimed without evidence that mail ballots are a source of voter fraud, including in the immediate aftermath of his election loss. He has consistently rejected election outcomes since his 2016 primary campaign, when he accused Ted Cruz of cheating in the Iowa Caucus.
And Trump and his administration officials continue to make unfounded claims about noncitizens voting.
The President’s election denialism is a primary source of distrust among his supporters, the researchers said.
“We can show directly that exposure to (Trump’s tweets) experimentally reduced trust and confidence in elections, increased beliefs that elections are rigged, but only among his supporters,” Brenden Nyhan, a professor of Government at Dartmouth College, said during the webinar.
The largest sources of skepticism from Democrats in the survey were the threat of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, showing up at polling locations, and the redistricting battle that played out over the past years.
A redistricting battle began in Texas in 2025 and led California voters to approve Proposition 50 that same year. As recently as last week, the Supreme Court blocked a redistricting plan in Missouri.
But the back-and-forth has contributed to levels of distrust. Forty-eight percent of Democrats and Independents in the survey said they don’t trust that congressional lines are drawn in a way that fairly reflects what voters want. Even 36% of Republicans agreed.
And forty percent of all respondents thought it was likely that ICE agents would be present at polling places in their area. But while 60% of Democrats said this would lower their confidence, 46% of Republicans said it would increase theirs.
Researchers said the level of distrust, however, could actually motivate people to vote.
“One thing the U.S. has benefitted from in a kind of perverse way is, despite the fact that there’s a lot of distrust out there…both sides still see elections as winnable,” Nyhan said. “And so there’s often a kind of refrain of, “We have to win by so much that they can’t steal the election from us.”
When it comes to who respondents trust to determine if an election is accurate, researchers said that Democrats mostly trust election officials, like county registrars and secretaries of state, while Republicans mostly trust President Trump and their friends and family.
The survey also found that education and income levels were the strongest predictors of levels of trust, after partisan affiliation.
Respondents with a high school diploma or some college trust elections significantly less than those with a college degree or higher, and those with a household income below $50,000 per year trust elections far less than those above that income level.
