International Democracy Insights - Election Reformers Network

Back to Normal Isn’t Good Enough for US Democracy after the 2022 Midterms

December 14, 2022Kevin Johnson

The midterm elections have raised hopes that democracy-distortion fever is breaking at last. Prominent swing state candidates who ran on election lies lost because of it. Local officials trying to block results they didn't like were easily brought to heel. Warnings from pundits about an underground right-wing takeover of local election infrastructure proved wildly exaggerated. In short, a...

Declaring Who Wins Elections Is Not A Job For Partisans

September 6, 2022Kevin Johnson

This post by By Kevin Johnson originally appeared on TalkingPointsMemo. If the stars align, Congress could soon pass a much-needed overhaul of the Electoral Count Act (ECA), the 19th-century law governing presidential electoral-vote counting, whose ambiguities helped spawn chaos on January 6th. In pushing to reform the ECA, a bipartisan group of senators is acknowledging a dangerous...

The only major democracy in the world…

August 3, 2022Kevin Johnson

This op-ed originally ran on The Fulcrum. This has been a summer of gut punches to the body politic. A Supreme Court bloc cobbled together by minority-backed presidents and a norm-abusing Senate has trampled precedent and lurched to extremes on the most divisive issues of our time. A presidential election that should have been laid...

US election deniers promoting democracy abroad defies reason

July 16, 2022Edward McMahon

This op-ed by ERN Board Members Larry Garber and Edward McMahon originally appeared on The Hill. The power of the more than 200-year-old American model of democracy has encouraged people across the globe to fight for their rights and freedoms, often in the face of brutal authoritarians. We have personally seen the impact of U.S….

Wisconsin election takeover threatens our republican form of government

December 9, 2021Al Vanderklipp

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 state’s legislature to seize…

Ensuring election integrity should not come at the cost of compromising voter access

June 14, 2021Larry Garber

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. Proposed election law changes in Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere have again brought to the forefront…

The US should help Palestinians vote regardless of potential outcomes

April 15, 2021Larry Garber

This post by Larry Garber originally appeared on The Hill. The ghost of 2006 hangs heavy over the heads of United States policymakers anticipating Palestinian elections scheduled for May 22. Hamas’s surprise victory over a divided Fatah in 2006 upended the plans of those within the Bush administration who had advocated for allowing the elections to proceed, notwithstanding the participation…

America, Welcome to the Ranks of Struggling Democracies

January 7, 2021Eric Bjornlund

This post originally appeared on the Foreign Policy website. Violent conflict over contested elections has plagued authoritarian and undemocratic countries around the world, as well as democracies that are troubled and threatened. On Wednesday, the United States became the newest member of this unfortunate club. Based on my experience working on election observation and democracy promotion…

Invalidating Elections Should Not Be Easy

December 8, 2020Larry Garber

This post originally appeared in Attorney at Law Magazine. Despite many Cassandra-like warnings of nightmare scenarios, the 2020 elections were an institutional success. Deserving credit are voters who participated in large numbers, election officials who adapted to the realities of conducting an election during a pandemic, and judges who balanced vague and sometimes conflicting constitutional…

Here’s How the 2020 U.S. Elections Resemble Those of Fragile Democracies

October 24, 2020Eric Bjornlund

This post originally appeared on foreignpolicy.com. With an incumbent president attacking the electoral process as rigged and refusing to commit to accepting the results, the Nov. 3 U.S. elections increasingly resemble those in struggling democracies and autocratic countries. I speak from experience, having led or managed some 40 election observation efforts in 22 countries over…

All Elections Have Irregularities; That Doesn’t Necessarily Invalidate Them

October 18, 2020Larry Garber

This post originally appeared on Medium. By Larry Garber and Thessalia Merivaki With only a few weeks to go before the Nov. 3 election, Americans are being bombarded by stories in the news and on social media about election irregularities. On a daily basis, voters hear reports that registration applications have been addressed to deceased persons…

Proposing a commission of prominent Americans to monitor our elections

May 2, 2020Larry Garber

Larry Garber has worked on overseas elections for 35 years and is on the board of Election Reformers Network, a nonprofit founded by such international specialists now working to improve American electoral systems. Thirty years ago this spring, I received a call from a colleague at the National Democratic Institute who was on assignment in Eastern…