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By Marc Champion @MarcChampion1 More stories by Marc Champion November 5, 2020, 12:01 AM EST Corrected November 5, 2020, 11:32 AM EST Canadians voted for a new parliament last year in a poll organized—from sea to shining sea—by a single, nonpartisan federal agency known as Elections Canada.
Lines outside polling stations in ethnic minority communities weren’t hours longer than elsewhere.There were no opaque torrents of cash flowing into unlimited campaign coffers, no warnings of mass fraud, no confusion over varied voting rules, no toxic debates about voter ID requirements.It was, in a word, dull.That’s something few would say of the presidential vote next door in the U.S.
And when it comes to the internal mechanics of democratic elections, dull is good.
Americans take pride in having the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.But even if Donald Trump ’s threats to challenge the count or its outcome should go unfulfilled, the 2020 presidential election has cruelly exposed structural flaws that mark the U.S.electoral system as among the weakest of any advanced democracy.If that sounds unduly harsh, it shouldn’t.A surprising amount of data gets collected on the wider process of holding elections, and for Americans, it makes brutal reading.
The most detailed index, by a Harvard-based nonprofit called the Electoral Integrity Project , ranks elections based on 49 criteria—including dispute resolution and the accuracy of voter rolls—as perceived by a mix of local and foreign election specialists.The latest 2019 index placed the U.S.
57th in the world.
Among core Western democracies, it came in at rock bottom.As older and newer democracies have raced ahead, “America hasn’t wanted to learn and hasn’t felt the need to learn,” says Pippa Norris, a lecturer in comparative politics at Harvard, who runs the project.“It doesn’t even look across the border at Canada or Mexico, at how other countries have run elections very efficiently.”
Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index, 2018 0= least integrity, 100 = most integrity
Data: Electoral Integrity Project.
Compiled from responses received by 574 election experts
For sure, there’s no such thing as a perfect electoral system, and the U.S.is hardly alone in struggling to manage challenges to its democracy right now.
Yet improving the way U.S.presidents and legislators are chosen matters for more reasons than just ensuring the majority of voters get the leaders they want.A stronger electoral system would make the U.S.less vulnerable to manipulation by Russia and other geopolitical adversaries as they exploit weaknesses to destabilize and distract what remains the world’s only military and economic superpower.
A better system would also help cement trust in state institutions, the essential element without which governments tend to fail, says Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist whose book on the Covid-19 pandemic, , was released on Oct.29.
Many of the Western democracies that score worst for their electoral processes—including the U.S., the U.K., Italy, and Spain—also score poorly in terms of their handling of the coronavirus , as measured by deaths per 100,000 of population to date.“If there is no trust, you can achieve nothing, because politics is about collective action,” Krastev says, pointing to the resistance many Americans have shown to advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on wearing masks.
So what would a good, dull U.S.election process look like? For one thing, it would be uniform, making the voting access, experience, and power of a citizen in Georgia a lot more like one in Maine as they cast ballots for the same presidential candidates.That’s something other nations with federal systems, such as Germany, have managed to achieve, but not the U.S.In fact, the electoral systems of America’s 50 states have been diverging, something that’s having consequences again.
Most states allowed counting of early ballots to start before polls closed on Nov.3, but a handful of battleground states didn’t.That delayed the overall result and opened space for Trump to call for those later counts to be stopped.
The Federal Election Commission , a central, bipartisan body formed in 1974 to rein in campaign finance abuse, has become gridlocked as the wider political environment has grown polarized.There were efforts again at incremental change after the “hanging chad” debacle of 2000, when George W.Bush lost the popular vote but won the White House, thanks to a mere 537 ballots in Florida, after the U.S.
Supreme Court intervened to block a recount.More recently, the Trump administration’s perceived encroachment on democratic conventions has fueled a new—albeit partisan—drive for improvements.The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives last year drafted H.R.1, a sweeping electoral reform bill named the For the People Act .It passed the House but stalled in the Republican-dominated Senate.
Some states haven’t waited.Vermont is among several that rank higher than Canada on the Electoral Integrity Project’s latest indexes, scoring 82 out of 100 to Canada’s 75.Other U.S.
states have been sliding backward, including Georgia, which with only 49 points scored measurably worse than its post-Soviet cognate on the Black Sea.
Despite all the constitutional and political barriers to change, some fixes could be made.An easy one would be to follow other nations in declaring federal elections a national holiday, so those who work aren’t penalized or discouraged by the need to wait in line.A tougher call: The U.S.could make voting mandatory, as it is in Australia, where turnout is routinely above 90%.Turnout for Nov.3’s U.S.
election was almost 67%, yet that makes it an outlier, the largest since 1900 and a good 10 percentage points more than in 2016.
The U.S.
could also join the mainstream of democracies by introducing nationwide automatic voter registration.
Although exact data are hard to come by, as many as 24% of eligible U.S.voters—about 50 million people—were unregistered as of 2012.Since then, 19 states plus the District of Columbia have adopted versions of automatic registration, but most still haven’t.That’s something H.R.1 seeks to fix—together with ensuring full enfranchisement for ex-felons no longer in prison and statehood for the Democratic-leaning residents of D.C.
India, like the U.S.
a highly decentralized federal state, registers all eligible voters when they turn 18.
The Election Commission of India then mails out a free voter ID card with a photo that’s matched to electoral rolls.Adopting a similar system would at a stroke eliminate the poisonous debate over America’s patchwork of sometimes discriminatory voter ID requirements.“If India can do it, with 800 million people going to the polls in hugely complicated elections, so can the U.S.,” says Norris of the Electoral Integrity Project.
Another practice to follow would be appointing independent bodies to decide boundaries in elections to the House of Representatives, something California has already done.That would do away with the grotesque gerrymandering both political parties practice in some states as they try to tilt electoral arithmetic in their favor.H.R.1 includes measures to do just that.And it would tighten campaign finance laws to enforce donor transparency on the so-called super PACs and dark-money pools that allow wealthy U.S.
executives and corporations—and potentially, foreign interests—to make anonymous and effectively limitless donations to the campaigns of future U.S.presidents.
Transparency alone may not be enough to end the corrosive perception that the highest bidders can buy U.S.politicians and their lawmaking.A common way to address that problem is to cap what candidates can spend to get elected.Canada sets the cap at about C$100,000 ($76,100) per candidate, with extra for the parties and TV advertising.In France, which has a presidential system not unlike that of the U.S., the 2017 campaign budgets for Emmanuel Macron and his opponent Marine Le Pen were limited to €16.85 million ($19.73 million) each in the first round vote and €22.5 million for the runoff two weeks later.Trump, by contrast, spent $647 million to win the White House in 2016, one of the cheapest U.S.
presidential campaigns on record; Hillary Clinton spent $1.2 billion.Adjusted for population size, that gave cash about four times as big a role to play as in Macron’s election.
There should be less disparity between the weight a vote for the Senate carries in different states, now at levels never envisaged by the founders, says Laura Thornton, director for global programs at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an intergovernmental organization based in Stockholm.
One solution would be to add senators for the biggest states, such as California, where a vote has almost 89 times less representative power than in Wyoming.The target for international monitors appraising elections worldwide is to keep such discrepancies to 10%, she says.
For similar one-person-one-vote reasons, a good U.S.presidential election would have no Electoral College, an institution for which the vast majority of other nations with popularly elected presidents have no equivalent.That’s a change that may not come anytime soon, because of the extreme difficulty of amending the 233-year-old U.S.Constitution.Fourteen states have acted to minimize the potential for the Electoral College to distort outcomes by agreeing to back whichever candidate wins the popular vote nationwide.
On Nov.3, Colorado voted to join them.Yet the piecemeal approach to reform is again causing divergence in what it means to vote for the same presidential candidate in different parts of the country.
“Part of the problem is just that it’s old,” Thornton says of the Constitution, noting that at the time it was drafted “there were no women judges, there were slaves, and California didn’t exist.” The document emerged as a series of compromises made in the struggle to form a federal republic rather than as a blueprint for democracy, she says.In fact, the big debate among the founders was how far to go in giving an equal vote to Americans who didn’t have property.It took until 1920 for an amendment to give women the right to vote.The Constitution now governs a nation that would be both geographically and demographically unrecognizable to Thomas Jefferson.
But probably the most meaningful, if unlikely, change the U.S.
could introduce is the one Canada made in 1920, Australia in 1984, and the U.K.
in 2001.Namely, to put an independent electoral commission in charge of running the nation’s federal elections, from soup to nuts, across the country.Doing so would go a long way to take partisan politics out of boundary making, polling station allocation, ballot design and counting, voter ID rules, and dispute resolution, in much the same way central bank independence helped take some of the politics out of setting monetary policy.By altogether removing election administration from the hands of local politicians, it also could obviate the need to restore the antidiscrimination protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which were lost seven years ago when the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to invalidate its key provisions.
The U.S.still has a functioning democracy and until now, at least, performed well when it came to counting votes accurately and honoring the result—two broad ravines that separate democracies in need of a fix from the kinds of cynical electoral theater seen in such countries as Belarus.
There, elections serve as tools to legitimize the retention of power rather than to enable populations to change their leaders.As the recently poisoned Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny put it in a tweet on Nov.
4: “Woke up and looked on Twitter to see who had won.Nothing was clear yet.Now that’s an election.”
Yet there’s no disguising that something serious is amiss in the fragmented, politicized U.S.electoral system, which seems weighed down by unscraped barnacles of the past.Paradoxically, America’s long-held status as leader of the free world also may have contributed to this ossification.After emerging on the winning side of World War II and then the Cold War, it seemed natural for the U.S.
to offer advice around the world on how to build democratic institutions and improve elections as democracies grew from 26% of nations in 1997 to 62% in 2019, according to IDEA’s Global State of Democracy index.America’s own institutions got a pass.
“As a German, of course I grew up admiring U.S.
democracy, but after coming here, that’s been replaced by real shock,” says Michael Bröning, who in June moved from Berlin to New York as executive director of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a German political think tank.From campaign finance to acceptance of the result, every layer of the electoral process seems dysfunctional, he says.“It’s like watching someone try to win a Formula One race with a horse-drawn carriage that was made in the 19th century.”
( Correction in last paragraph for the name of the German think-tank Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung ) Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal.LEARN MORE Have a confidential news tip?
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