27◼ELECTION BloombergBusinessweek November 9, 2020
budgetsforEmmanuelMacronandhisopponentMarine
LePen were limited to €16.85 million ($19.73 million) each in
thefirstroundvoteand€22.5millionfortherunofftwoweeks
later.Trump,bycontrast,spent$647milliontowintheWhite
Housein2016,oneofthecheapest U.S. presidential campaigns
on record; Hillary Clinton spent $1.2 billion. Adjusted for popu-
lation 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 organi-
zation based in Stockholm. One solution would be to add sena-
tors 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 compro-
mises 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 coun-
try. 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,
inmuchthesamewaycentralbankindependencehelped
takesomeofthepoliticsoutofsettingmonetarypolicy.By
altogether removing election administration from the hands
of local politicians, it also could obviate the need to restore
Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index, 2018DATA:ELECTORALRESPONSESINTEGRITYPROJECT.OF 574 ELECTIONCOMPILEDEXPERTSFROMLeastintegrity Most integritythe 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 accu-
rately and honoring the result—two broad ravines that sep-
arate 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. democ-
racy, 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-Erhard-
Stiftung, a German political think tank. From campaign
finance to acceptance of the result, every layer of the elec-
toral 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.” <BW>