Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

The only major democracy in the world with …

Brett Kavanaugh

The confirmation of nominees to the Supreme Court, like Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, has become increasingly polarized because the justices serve life tenures — a feature rare in a major democracy.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Johnson is executive director of the Election Reformers Network.

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 to rest by a 7 million vote lead and the rulings of dozens of courts stalks the country like the undead. Partisan zealot candidates for top state election jobs ignore the rule of law and threaten to subvert the will of voters.

A once-fringe legal theory could give even more power over elections to state legislatures, which often put party interests above democratic principles. And with redistricting now complete, the nation faces another decade of gerrymandered elections likely to further empower extremes. Underlying all these dysfunctions is a common theme: antiquated systems that make the United States an extreme outlier, far out of step with democratic norms.


The U.S. is the only major democracy with:

  • Life tenure for judges of the highest court — a key driver of the politicization of the Supreme Court.
  • Presidential voting distorted by an electoral college.
  • Openly partisan officials running elections.
  • Power over federal elections in the hands of state legislatures.
  • Redistricting controlled by the parties running for office.

The list goes on – and all these problems get worse as our political polarization intensifies.

Election Reformers Network was built on the premise that the U.S. can find a way out of dysfunction in part by understanding what is working better in other democracies. This is not to disregard the system’s many particularly American strengths — a robust ecosystem of civic organizations, for example, or the thousands of committed and hard-working election professionals across the country. But the comparative indicators cannot be ignored.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The founder of modern democracy, the United States ranks at the bottom of the developed world in voter confidence. And earlier this year, a leading democracy index downgraded us from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy.” The basic functions of governing seem beyond us — things like passing a national budget under regular procedures or even peacefully transferring power to the election winner.

Focusing on what we can learn from elsewhere is actually a profoundly optimistic stance. It takes as given that we are not inherently too divided to heal, that our problems stem largely from things the Founders could not help but get wrong because there were no functioning national democracies for them to learn from. And focusing on fixing our antiquated rules — as opposed to railing against our bad actors — is the only way to build support that is broad enough to accomplish change.

Of course, structural reform never comes easy, often taking many decades. But there are winnable near-term reforms, inspired by global best practices and tailored to U.S. circumstances, that we all can pursue.

ERN is advancing new policies to reduce the risks emerging from our traditional — and unique — partisan approach to election administration. These include ethics legislation to prohibit partisan favoritism by election officials and new models for selecting election officials that help ensure they’re professional experts not partisan politicians. These reforms can nip the incipient threat of partisan loyalists subverting elections from the inside and should appeal equally to people worried about voter fraud or voter suppression. They also can help protect election officials, who lately have been subject to threats and intimidation, by underlining their status as impartial public servants, above the partisan fray.

We also need to reduce the number of states where legislatures control redistricting, something once common in other democracies and now largely abolished. The mechanism to bring the U.S. in line with best practice is a uniquely American innovation – the citizen redistricting commission.

We’re launching new initiatives to reform canvass boards — another risky U.S.-only entity — from using the certification process to hijack elections, as some have lately tried to do. And we’re continuing to lay the groundwork to advance more transformative change when the time is right, including our own solution to the Electoral College and our support for multimember congressional districts, which columnist David Brooks calls “One Reform to Save America.”

Encouragingly, we’re finding that people we speak to are increasingly interested in what works in other democracies. It turns out the world has had nearly 6,000 nation-years of democratic government, 96 percent of that amount in countries other than the United States. That’s a lot of experience we could be learning from. Australia gave us the secret ballot in the 19th century, and there are many more ideas we can customize to our unique context. In markets and technology, science and sports, Americans readily adapt what’s proven to work elsewhere.

Refusing to do so in democracy as well could consign us to a future of more of the gut punches that hit this summer.

Read More

Complaint Filed to Ethics Officials Regarding Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
red and white x sign

Complaint Filed to Ethics Officials Regarding Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

On Friday, March 21, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) related to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick urging the purchase of Tesla stock on March 19th.

CLC is a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the challenges facing American democracy. Its mission is to fight for every American’s freedom to vote and participate meaningfully in the democratic process, particularly Americans who have faced political barriers because of race, ethnicity, or economic status.

Keep ReadingShow less
Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

The U.S. White House.

Getty Images, Caroline Purser

Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

Presidential Immunity: History and Background

Presidential immunity is the long-standing idea that the president of the United States has exemption from liability or legal proceedings for acts related to the duties of presidential office. Contrary to popular belief, presidential immunity is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution; only sitting members of Congress are explicitly granted judicial immunity through the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Rather, the concept of presidential immunity has arisen through the Department of Justice’s longstanding policy against prosecuting presidents in office and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Article II, which has developed through a number of Supreme Court cases dating back to 1867.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump
President Donald Trump.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Trump 2.0: Navigating the New Political Landscape

With Trump’s return to the White House, we once again bear daily witness to a spectacle that could be described as entertaining, were it only a TV series. But Trump’s unprecedented assault on our democratic norms and institutions is not only very real but represents the gravest peril our democratic republic has confronted in the last 80 years.

Trump’s gradual consolidation of power and authoritarian proclivities, reminiscent of an earlier era, are very frightening on their own account. But it is his uncanny ability to control the narrative that empowers him to shred our nation’s fabric while proceeding with impunity. His actions not only threaten the very republic that he now leads but overturn the entire post-WWII world order, which is now in chaos. Trump has ostensibly cast aside the governing principle with the U.N. Charter of Sovereignty. By suggesting on multiple occasions that the U.S. will “get Greenland one way or another,” and that Canada might become our 51st state, our neighbor to the north is now developing plans to protect itself from what it views as the enemy across the border.

Keep ReadingShow less
Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

A speakerphone locked in a cage.

Getty Images, J Studios

Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

On June 4, 2024, an op-ed I penned (“Project 2025 is a threat to democracy”) was published in The Fulcrum. It received over 74,000 views and landed as one of the top 10 most-read op-eds—out of 1,460—published in 2024.

The op-ed identified how the right-wing extremist Heritage Foundation think tank had prepared a 900-page blueprint of actions that the authors felt Donald Trump should implement—if elected—in the first 180 days of being America’s 47th president. Dozens of opinion articles were spun off from the op-ed by a multitude of cross-partisan freelance writers and published in The Fulcrum, identifying—very specifically—what Trump and his appointees would do by following the Heritage Foundation’s dictum of changing America from a pluralistic democracy to a form of democracy that, according to its policy blueprint, proposes “deleting the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), plus gender equality, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.”

Keep ReadingShow less