Transparency: Arizona elections use paper ballots and double-check results with public audits. Anyone can watch these steps, so voters know the process is transparent.
Election Integrity: Proof of citizenship is required to register to vote, and counties verify eligibility. Election officials cross-check voter information to ensure only qualified citizens vote.
Signature Verification: Mail ballots include a signed affidavit. Counties verify signatures and notify voters of mismatches, allowing corrections and preventing fraud while keeping voting convenient.
Election Accuracy: Arizona processes early ballots as they arrive, with results released after polls close. Election Day ballots are checked and counted, to ensure every vote is accurate.
Local Accountability: County election officials and workers – your neighbors – run Arizona elections. They follow strict procedures and publish audit trails, building accountability to voters.
Drop Box Security: Ballot drop boxes are placed in secure locations and monitored with chain-of-custody procedures. Every transfer is tracked, making them a safe and easy way to vote.
In a state roiled by skepticism of the 2020 election results, large percentages of likely voters across the spectrum said that learning certain aspects of the process increased their confidence, according to a new Declare/Cygnal poll of Arizona.
The survey, the first in a series of multiple swing states, asked respondents how a battery of messages about rules of the voting system affected their perception of it. In the case of two particular messages, about ballot transparency and voter eligibility, the gap between greater and lesser trust was at least plus-55 percentage points across Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
“Arizona elections use paper ballots and double-check results with public audits. Anyone can
watch these steps, so voters know the process is transparent,” one message reads. Sixty-five percent of Republicans said that it boosted their confidence in Arizona’s election policies and procedures, and 10 percent said it made them less confident. For Democrats and Independents, the splits were 71/6 and 72/6.
“In a sea of negative news about how the sausage-making works, nobody looks at sausage-making and says, ‘I want to eat more sausage,’ except when it comes to this,” Cygnal pollster Alex Tarascio told Declare. “This is an area where exposing people to how this part of the process works made people much more confident in it.”
Informing respondents that proof of citizenship is required to register to vote and that counties verify eligibility showed a similar effect among all three partisan groups. In Arizona, proof of citizenship is required for approval to vote in state and local elections, but not federal ones. It and New Hampshire are the only two states with an active citizenship verification requirement for election registration; a handful of other states have such a requirement in law, but either haven’t implemented it or had it struck down in court.
That particular issue has been central to debate about the SAVE America Act, a Republican-led bill in Congress that would mandate documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration in all 50 states. Citizenship is already a requirement under federal law to vote in federal elections, and all applicants are required to swear that they’re citizens on registration forms, under penalty of fines, imprisonment, ineligibility for citizenship, and/or deportation. Fraud databases such as the one maintained by the Heritage Foundation and audits in multiple states have consistently found that noncitizen voting is negligible.
Still, election distrust up across the board, as well
Another notable survey finding that instead is a mix of sanguine and bad news is about faith in the legitimacy of election results overall, from 2020, to 2024, and looking ahead to this year. It’s been a journey. Republicans continue to believe that “widespread process errors or fraud . . . altered results” in ‘20 by a wide margin over other options: 61 percent said so, compared to 11 percent who said there were significant irregularities that didn’t change the outcome, 9 percent who said there were minor administrative problems, and 10 percent who said there were no significant issues with the process. Twenty-nine percent of Independents and six percent of Democrats assessed the 2020 election as having result-altering process errors.
Smaller numbers of Republicans and Independents — 36 and 22 percent, respectively — said the same of ‘24. Democrats held mostly steady (from 6 percent to 9 percent).
In advance of this year’s Midterms, however, expected distrust is on the rise. Forty-three percent of Republicans say there may be widespread process errors that affect this year’s results; 28 percent of Independents say so; and even 16 percent of Democrats now say so. That makes for a 6-7 percentage-point increase among the three groups from last election to this one. Compared with 2020, however, the difference diverges: Republicans are less skeptical of the widespread errors now than then by 18 percent points, but Democrats are more skeptical by 9 percentage points.
Overall, doubt in the process remains much more common among Republicans than other partisan groups, but the gap has narrowed noticeably — during a 12-month period in which news events such as the sale of Dominion Voting Machines and redistricting fights prompted leading Democrats to adopt questioning rhetoric, such as former President Obama, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and “rising star” and House member Jasmine Crockett.
The next state in the Declare/Cygnal survey is Georgia. The Arizona survey polled 600 likely Arizona voters, with a margin of error of +/- 4.0 percent. A deck of the results is available here.
