Measuring the Extent to Which Voter Fraud Beliefs Link Election Reforms to Voter Confidence in the United States.

This article examines how beliefs about voter fraud mediate the relationship between restrictive voting policies and voter confidence in the United States, with a focus on partisan differences. Using the Cost of Voting Index (COVI) to measure voting restrictiveness and data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), the study finds that among Republicans, voter fraud beliefs significantly mediate the positive effect of restrictive voting policies on voter confidence, accounting for about 14–17 percent of this relationship. In contrast, for Democrats, restrictive policies decrease voter confidence without a significant mediation effect from fraud beliefs. The findings highlight that partisan elite signaling shapes perceptions of election reforms and suggest that restrictive voting policies do not uniformly increase voter confidence, raising implications for election policy and democratic norms.