24
▶TheU.S.couldadopta feweasy
reforms—anda fewtoughones—to
takethedramaoutofitsdemocracy▶ByMarcChampion
THERE’S
GOT TO
BE A
BETTER
WAY
Canadiansvotedfora newparliamentlastyearina poll
organized—from sea to shining sea—by a single, nonpartisan
federal agency known as Elections Canada. Lines outside poll-
ing 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 mechan-
ics of democratic elections, dull is good.
Americans take pride in having the world’s oldest con-
stitutional 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 weak-
est 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 Bloomberg Businessweek November 9, 2020