Lessons from the 2024 presidential election

SNF Agora Institute fellow Scott Warren explains how we can continue to build trust in election processes

Scott Warren is a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently leading an initiative focused on exploring, researching, and convening a pro-democracy conservative agenda in the U.S., with a short-term focus on election trust. This has involved organizing convenings in more than 15 states across the country, conducting polling on the topic of conservatives, identity, democracy, and election trust, and catalyzing effective democracy work.

Scott Warren spent the four years in between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections working with a network of Republican election administrators, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to build trust in election processes. After the election results were in, Warren reflected on voting in 2024 and what can be done to strengthen processes further.

What were your broad takeaways from this election cycle?

By and large, we’re hearing from our folks that this election went—on the aggregate—well, in terms of implementation and trust. It’s important to note that a lot of that probably has to do with the margins, and some of that has to do with who won.

Our initial research seems to indicate a lot more people across the board trust the results of the 2024 election cycle. Election administrators did a lot of work to make that happen. There’s an opportunity and necessity to build on that right now.

What kind of beneficial programs and policies did election administrators put in place for the 2024 election?

There are a lot of states and counties that have put policies into place to boost transparency. They opened up their processes in advance to demonstrate how voters cast ballots, how votes are tabulated, etc.

There was a lot more support on the right to build trust in mail-in voting, which was a significant problem in 2020. They demonstrated how things like signature verification happen.

Some folks in our network are doing innovative things. The New York Times recently published a story about a county in Idaho that has started publishing every single vote. The ballots are anonymized, but you can see in a transparent fashion how many votes each candidate got. One of the reasons to do this is because split-ticket voting still happens in ways that people don’t actually think it does.

Do you think other states and counties will now implement election administration reforms?

Hopefully. I think we’re going to see more states and counties grapple with tradeoffs. For example, some states say your ballot must arrive by Election Day to be counted. Others, such as California, say it has to be postmarked by Election Day. The tradeoff is, in California, people can take more time to vote, but it’s going to take longer to tabulate the results.

Additionally, voter ID laws might start to gain traction going forward. It’s become a partisan talking point, but it has widespread support from voters across the country. North Carolina put it into place and didn’t have any substantial problems.