COVID-19 creates unique hurdles for the United States’ electoral system. Whatever responses are developed, including expanding voting by mail, we should be careful that untested procedures, or signature verification issues, or other unexpected problems don’t become 2020’s hanging chad. A critical way to reduce risk is to make better use of the 77-day time period…
By Kevin Johnson, Larry Garber, and Edward McMahon Since Ronald Reagan launched the National Endowment for Democracy in 1982, the U.S. government has regularly funded American organizations working to support democracy overseas. In scores of countries around the world, Americans have advised on the design of new election systems, nurtured emerging civil society, funded voter…
Written by Edward R. McMahon, ERN Board Vice Chair A wide variety of election management models, all of which are supposed to ensure legitimate elections, exist throughout the democratic world. It is normal that countries will choose different ways of conducting elections, as countries are in a sense, like snowflakes – no two ones are…
Published in Commonwealth Magazine, March 10, 2020 VOTERS ACROSS MASSACHUSETTS approached last week’s presidential primary with different views on whom to support and what issues are most critical to address this election season. Yet many shared a common emotion: frustration at a system that stifles their voice by giving them only one choice, especially with over…
— Thank you Rob, It’s been a pleasure to get to know you and this great organization. It’s also an honor to co-host this event. When we got started, one of our first steps was to seek wisdom from Rob and Cynthia, and Rob, it was good to learn that conversation was a coming…
Published in The Fulcrum, January 30, 2020 Our historical cousins in the United Kingdom vote much like we do — in single-member districts, under simple plurality rules — so their elections are worth paying attention to. This is particularly true now that “the duopoly,” the dominance of two parties characteristic of single-member-district systems, has become…
Either way, it’s Time for an Amendment, including a Proportional Solution for the Electoral College. Remarkably, we still lack a basic fact about the election system we’ve used for more than 200 years: whether electors can vote as they choose. On Friday, the Supreme Court announced it will resolve that question. The Court will likely…
Washington, DC; December 13, 2019. Election Reformers Network has received an 18-month grant to support its work to address conflicts of interest at the state chief election officer level. “This is an important but complicated and neglected area of reform, so we are thrilled to have the support of an organization with the sophistication of…
Published in The Fulcrum, November 13, 2019 Americans have long been talking about different reforms to our election system, but it’s a young upstart — ranked-choice voting — that is rocketing to center stage. In New York City, most people had never heard of ranked-choice voting when the city’s Charter Commission announced in April that the reform…
Thank you Jeff, and thank you to Nancy MacLean and Neal Simon for these critically important insights. As Jeff said, here are two people with very different starting points and very different methodologies arriving at the same conclusion: that we need fundamental structural reform. Fundamental change is what the organization I lead, Election Reformers Network,…
