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What events caused voters to lose faith in the political system during the Vietnam War?
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Voters lost faith in the political system during the Vietnam War due to several key events: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the mishandling of the Vietnam War by top officials, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, police violence, and the Watergate scandal. Additionally, the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the perceived failures of the Civil Rights movement contributed to widespread disillusionment.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy in late 1963 and the conspiracy theories that almost immediately began to swirl around the official version of events (and which have never gone away) planted the first seed of what became wholesale unrest and disillusion in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the single great cause of loss of faith in leadership was the government's handling of the war in Vietnam.
As it became increasingly evident that top officials were blatantly lying about the progress of the war and that US troops were being unnecessarily killed in a conflict that was being badly mishandled, citizens became increasingly restive. People simply don't like to die or have their sons sent to die for reasons they don't understand in a war that seems to be managed by immoral incompetents. Added to this, the way the draft was handled seemed arbitrary and unfair.
What added...
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a great deal of fuel to the fire was the almost back to back assassination of two admired leaders, the Reverend Martin Luther King in April of 1968 and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in June of the same year. People were suspicious about these killings, and the very fact that they happened at all caused people to feel the society they lived in was being upended. Police violence against protesters at the Democratic Convention that year, and the National Guard firing on and killing four students nonviolently protesting the Vietnam War two years later at Kent State also added to feelings of mistrust toward the government.
All of this boiled over into the Watergate scandal that broke in 1972. Nixon was not by any stretch of the imagination a good guy, and burglarizing the Democratic National Headquarters and then lying about it were criminal acts, but the country also needed a scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong and was continuing to go wrong in Vietnam, and Nixon was that person.
Underlying all this was an increasingly well-educated populace that was willing to ask questions and challenge authority in ways they had not in the past. Idealism was also part of the national character at that time. People expected leaders to conform to ethical norms of behavior and were shocked, disillusioned, and outraged when they did not.