The Racial Typification of Election Officials and Trust in Elections
2026-05-22
Who do Americans think runs their elections? This paper examines the racial typification of election officials, that is, how Americans perceive the racial composition of the people who administer elections and what drives those perceptions. Using survey data from a module in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study paired with county-level demographic data, we model perceptions of election official racial composition as a compositional dependent variable using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) models. We find that partisanship is the driving predictor of racialized perceptions. Republicans perceive a substantially greater share of election officials as non-white, even after controlling for the actual racial demographics of respondents’ counties. We then show that these perceptions carry downstream consequences for election trust. Among white respondents, perceiving a greater share of election officials as Black is associated with significantly lower trust in local election officials and lower confidence that the 2024 election would be run fairly. These findings suggest that as America diversifies, public trust in elections may be undermined not by actual failures of administration, but by racialized perceptions of who holds administrative power.