In the last three years, election administration and election officials have been pulled into the political fray. Most election systems are designed to be led by nonpartisan experts with the best interests of all voters in mind. But today, these systems and experts must contend with growing partisan polarization, political vitriol, and misinformation.
This post by ERN Executive Director Kevin Johnson originally appeared on The Fulcrum. It points out that elections in 2022 for secretary of state featured well-funded "stop the steal" candidates who appeared ready to undermine elections to help their side win.
Here in America we don’t have the same range of parties as in the U.K. — in part because our Congress is undersized, with only one-seventh the number of representatives per citizen. But we do have political groupings that have trouble gaining representation in proportion to their share of the population.
With partisan loyalists aiming to control election administration, it's clear that America's antiquated system of politically affiliated election officials needs reform.
This post by ERN Executive Director Kevin Johnson originally appeared on The Hill. With Jan. 6 dominating headlines last week, Senate Republicans raised a topic they are not often associated with: election reform. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Republican Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and others proposed fixing the Electoral Count Act (ECA), the archaic law governing the count of...
Julie Anderson, who is vying for the role of Washington State's secretary of state, says she likes "a challenge." But even in a state that's elected independent-minded secretaries of state in the past, Anderson said, trying to get elected as a nonpartisan candidate within the US's two-party political system is inherently an uphill battle...
This post by Kevin Johnson and Al Vanderklipp originally appeared on The Fulcrum. Johnson and Vanderklipp are, respectively, the executive director and research fellow for the Election Reformers Network and the co-authors of Nonpartisanship Works: How Lessons from Canada Can Reestablish Trust in U.S. Election Administration. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has repeated the call for his states legislature to seize...
Though Secretaries of State are the chief election official in most states, the actual duties assigned to them in state constitutions and state electoral code vary widely. With these positions drawing hyper-partisan attention, its reasonable to assume that at some point a secretary of state may attempt to influence, or even subvert, an election.
This post by Larry Garber and Avery Davis-Roberts originally appeared in The Fulcrum. Garber is an international elections expert and a member of the Carter Center's U.S. election expert team. Davis-Roberts is an associate director in the center's Democracy Program...
This post originally appeared on the Rank the Vote Blog. In November of 2019, after a hard-fought campaign, New York City voters overwhelmingly approved a ranked choice voting ballot question. With a ballot that allows support for multiple candidates in order of preference, RCV gives the electorate more impact on race outcomes and a greater...