Building trust, one post at a time
Election officials as social media influencers
Editor’s note: Happy National Voter Education Week to all who celebrate! Today we’ve got a great piece on what actually improves trust in elections from a scholar who studies just that: Thessalia Merivaki.
Election officials aren’t just running your local polling station—they’re out there making elections more transparent and accessible, one social media post at a time. And these communications can make a difference; they can help voters avoid mistakes that could exclude them from voting, and can build confidence in the integrity of our election system.
I spend a lot of time observing how election officials connect with voters on social media platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Threads. Since 2020, Professor Mara Suttmann-Lea (Connecticut College) and I have been running the Election Officials Communications Tracker, an innovative research project that tracks communications from election officials during every election cycle as they share information about voter registration and mail voting, prebunk and debunk misinformation, and explain why post-election audits ensure that election outcomes are accurate.
Through this project, Mara and I have been able to test what we call the “educative effects” of social media communications on voter behavior. We find that when election officials share concise, clear, and accessible messages about how to vote, their constituents are more likely to complete election processes successfully, like registering to vote and voting by mail.
We also have been able to test the “trust-building” effects of election officials’ communications on voter confidence—that one’s vote, votes in one’s community and state, and votes nationwide will be counted accurately. We find that when election officials share explicit messages of trust—that they are trusted sources of information and that elections are safe and secure—voters express higher confidence in ballot accuracy.
This cycle, we focus our tracking efforts on documenting the various ways election officials build trust by investing in their communities: organizing events with local partners, conducting outreach to under-served communities, engaging in information sharing with other state officials and government agencies, and embracing a public-facing role that may make them a target.
The bottom line? Election officials are playing a critical role in combating misinformation and building a resilient election ecosystem—one social media post at a time. If you care about the future of democracy, these efforts deserve attention and support. In our view, investing in election officials' communication work is an investment in building public trust in our elections.
To learn more about our work, contact Thessalia Merivaki and Mara Suttmann-Lea.
Thessalia Merivaki (Ph.D., she/her) is an Associate Teaching Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy and an Associate Research Professor at the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University. You can find more about her work here.
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