Jon Meacham is one of America’s leading thinkers on how the country’s political history can inform the present. He recently visited Penn State to present a lecture on his 2018 book The Soul of America and joined us for a wide-ranging conversation on the war in Ukraine (and whether Zelensky really is like Churchill), American polarization polarization, the changing media landscape, and more.
Check out his recent interview on "Democracy Works."
Former President Jimmy Carter observes voting procedures in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1990.
Merloe provides strategic advice on elections and democracy in the United States and internationally. He worked with former President Jimmy Carter on elections and democratic transitions on four continents.
On Oct. 1, President Jimmy Carter turns 100 years old. According to reports, he is concerned about the dynamics surrounding the 2024 election and hopeful that the United States will turn the page. That is no surprise given his devotion to this country and his dedication to fostering genuine elections around the world.
He first observed a foreign election in 1989 as co-leader, with former President Gerald Ford, of the joint international election observation mission to Panama organized by the nonpartisan National Democratic Institute and what is now the International Republican Institute. His role in helping to expose Manuel Noriega’s attempted fraud in that election had profound effects in Panama and inspired Carter to do more. Often working with NDI, he guided The Carter Center into the forefront of international election observation in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
In my role of almost three decades leading NDI’s international election programs, I had the honor of working closely with Carter in numerous elections. I witnessed him bring together for the first time in years the two antagonistic leaders of Bangladesh and negotiate their renouncing violence in an upcoming election. I saw him help Liberia’s contentious presidential candidates accept electoral results. He brought international attention to the credibility of Palestinian elections and promoted confidence in Peru’s post-Fujimori elections when public trust was fragile.
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His successful bridge building in such hyper-polarized circumstances was aided by his reputation for listening, analyzing and offering recommendations based on ethical principles, rather than an advantage of the moment or some personal transactional consideration. In 2005, Carter joined NDI’s then board chair, Madeleine Albright, and other dignitaries at a commemoration led by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to launch the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation, which is now endorsed by more than 50 international organizations in an ongoing implementation process that guides their work.
In keeping with that spirit, on the International Day of Democracy (Sept. 15.), five leading organizations — International IDEA, The Carter Center, NDI, the International Foundation for Election Systems and the Kofi Annan Foundation — launched the Model Commitments for Advancing Genuine and Credible Elections. The commitments, already supported by nine other key international organizations, provide a basis for dialogue around safeguarding and improving electoral processes in any country — including in the United States. While the urgent challenges of securing election administration, protecting the right to vote, addressing disinformation and potential disruptions, plus curtailing threats and potentials for political violence are of immediate concern to countries heading to elections, the commitments provide a wider context.
As one of the people involved in developing the declaration of principles and the model commitments, I can attest that they were inspired by the examples set by Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Madeleine Albright and so many others who dedicated themselves to bringing about genuine elections and advancing democracy.
On the occasion of his 100th birthday it is fitting to shine a bright light on this aspect of President Carter’s rich legacy of accomplishments in this country and around the globe. Hopefully, we will amplify his legacy as we move ahead, both here and abroad.
Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader.” This is the fifth entry in a series on political followership.
We recently read in The Washington Post that men in Afghanistan are regretting that they did not stand up sooner for the rights of their wives and daughters, now that the Taliban is imposing severe standards of dress and conduct on them.
Duh.
That’s the oldest regret there is when it comes to oppression:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— Martin Niemöller, Lutheran Pastor
Niemöller was initially a Nazi supporter … until the Nazis began to target the Lutheran Church. Once they come for you, it is too late. Start worrying when they come for your neighbor.
But here’s the trick. You can’t just leave it to the “opposition” to speak up. Of course they are going to speak up. And they will get tuned out.
It’s the loyal supporters who need to speak up early. Theirs is the voice that makes a difference and, as I explain in my new book “To Stop a Tyrant,” they can apply the “brakes” to toxic behavior. Here’s the interesting news: They can do this while still supporting the leader if he or she accepts the boundaries of communal decency.
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Take Anna Kilgore. It was she who filed a police report blaming Haitian immigrants when her cat went missing. Whoops.
Miss Sassy was found several days later in Kilgore’s own basement. But the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates were already using the story to whip up anti-immigrant fever.
What to do? Kilgore is a Trump supporter. Because her cat story is already uber-public, this could make the candidate she is supporting look bad. Despite this, what does she do? Anna Kilgore sends an apology to her Haitian neighbors
In Yiddish there is an expression for that: being a mensch. A mensch, while literally meaning “a man,” colloquially means an ethical person who does the right thing.
We need “menschkeit” (the quality of being a mensch) in every walk of life, on both sides of the political aisle. Ideally, this comes from our political leaders. But let’s not depend on them. We, the political followers, have the power to do what is right and — let’s go out on a limb here — the moral obligation to do so.
A colleague of mine is famous for asking, “How many people did Adolf Hitler kill?” Her answer: none.
There is no evidence of Hitler ever having pulled the trigger on a single person other than himself at the very end. Who did kill the millions of prisoners in extermination camps? His followers who did not stop his frothing hate speech early enough to avoid their own horrible complicity, while they still could.
Look around. Who is being targeted now by political vitriol? If it is not you, surely you can go back to sleep. Or can you? Who should you be speaking up for now, so that later there is someone left to speak for you?
When someone does speak up, here’s another wild idea: Support them! When a neighbor, Erika Lee, heard that Kilgore found Miss Sassy, she was appalled that she had inadvertently triggered a national frenzy by having written a Facebook post about the missing tabby. She took down the post. Lee has publicly regretted contributing to the story based on something she heard from yet another neighbor who also heard it from someone …
Whoops again. Whether online or over the clothesline, we are all responsible for verifying salacious tidbits before spreading them throughout the system. (No need to feel guilty. Just don’t do it again.)
The Taliban is at it once more in Afghanistan. Whose behavior needs standing up to here, in our own political system? If we oppose them, have at it. If we support them, it’s even more important to stand up to their overreach.
After all, if they don’t listen to us, who will they listen to?
Another wise man said, “If not now, when?”
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen, is an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms to advance women’s representation and leadership in the United States.
Terrell and her husband, Rob Richie. helped to found FairVote — a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice and a more representative democracy. Terrell has worked on projects related to women’s representation, democracy and voting system reform in the United States and has helped parliamentarians around the globe meet United Nations goals for women’s representation and leadership.
She has worked as campaign manager and field director for candidates for the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate and governor. She has also been involved in state and city-wide initiative efforts, including a state equal rights amendment.
In 2024 Terrell was named one of Washington, D.C.’s top policy experts and received a Generational Impact Award for her work on voting system reform. Terrell is a member of Citizen University’s Civic Collaboratory and was named a Brewer fellow along with a cohort of leaders in the democracy reform movement. She has a chapter on women and the presidency in the 2020 volume of “The Best Candidate: Presidential Nomination in Polarized Times.”
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Terrell writes a weekly column on women’s representation for Ms. Magazine and has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Hill, Refinery29, The Nation, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The American Prospect, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and The Christian Science Monitor. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and has participated in numerous radio shows, podcasts and panel discussions on the topics of electoral reform and systems strategies to advance women’s representation and leadership.
Terrell is an avid knitter and gardener, has three children, and is active in local politics and in the Quaker community. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College in 1986.
I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Terrell for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader.” This is the fourth entry in a series on political followership.
The presidential debate has come and gone. The sittingAmerican president is rattling the saber of long-range weapons for Ukraine. The sitting Russian dictator is expelling the West’s diplomatic staff. The outgoing president of Mexico has pulled off the largest-ever change of a judicial system in a substantial democracy. The prime minister of Israel defies the populace by continuing to use bludgeons to free hostages who increasingly are freed post-mortem. The presumed winner of the presidential election in Venezuela has fled the country.
This was last week. When did politics become so consequential?
Answer: It always has been.
In each of these cases an individual who has managed to make themselves the leader of their polity through outplaying rivals in the political game is now impacting millions of lives. What of their followers? Remember, there are no leaders without followers.
In my book, “To Stop a Tyrant,”I focus on the followers while everyone else is focusing on the leaders. What do followers want? Why do they follow?
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As always, the elite (who hate to view themselves as followers) act from the hubris that they can elevate and control the political leader. They do a pretty good job of this until they miscalculate, allow the leader to accrue too much power and find themselves the ones at the end of the puppet strings.
Members of the inner circle, practically drunk on the power of being able to influence the putative leader, outsmart and outmaneuver each other until the leader loses confidence in them and turns to other, more questionable confidants. Woe to the leader whose confidants stroke their fragile egos.
The vast army of bureaucrats sit warily on the sidelines, wondering who they will be answering to, calculating how much they can use the newly installed power to their advantage, or how much they can thwart threatened incursions on their well- guarded turf.
Meanwhile, the activists act. Paid or unpaid, that’s their job. More importantly, that’s their passion. Some paint their chosen person as the savior and some paint them as the destroyer of worlds.
You, dear citizen, will need to sort out which scenario is more credible.
If I were king, my one decree would be that all young people in a democracy study historic examples of how democracies die. How ruthless leaders have been elevated by people like themselves in the belief they were the answer to the country’s woes. How they missed the warning signs until it was too late and the leader had full control of the coercive power of the state. They would play simulations. Experiment with choices. See the outcomes. And prepare themselves to meet the temptations of their own era with a clear mind.
In my book, I use the term “prototyrant” to describe the political leader with the characteristics who, given the chance, can morph into a full blown tyrant. I asked a friend of mine who supports a candidate with too many of these characteristics why he is not worried about them achieving office. His answer seemed simple. The military in our country would never go along with a dictator. It sounded good. I want to believe the same thing.
Yet, the belief is almost childlike. History offers no proof that this would be the outcome. If it were, the result would just as likely be civil war or chaos. The time to interrupt the progression of a prototyrant is before they control the coercive levers of the state. If they have fooled us into giving them access to the levers, slam the brakes hard as soon as they begin to misuse those levers.
No prototyrant gets better when in power.
“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We were told that in 1907 when it was published in a collection of Lord Acton’s letters and essays. It seems a hundred years hasn’t been enough time for us to digest this crucial observation.
I have examined the rare instances when enough individuals in the five circles of political followers work together to stop a prototyrant while they can. It may be time to consider these examples and do a bit of make-up study for the class we never took on how to keep democracies alive.
Minkin is a research associate at Issue One. Clapp is the campaign manager for election protection at Issue One. Assefa is a research intern at Issue One.
Bill Gates, a registered Republican, was re-elected to the Maricopa County (Ariz.) Board of Supervisors in 2020 after first being elected in 2016. Before joining the board, he served on the Phoenix City Council for seven years, from 2009 to 2016, including a term as vice mayor in 2013.
Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, is the fourth-largest county in the United States, and it has the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country, with about 2.5 million active, registered voters and about 4.5 million residents. Gates represents roughly 900,000 residents as a supervisor for the 3rd district.
Maricopa County became a hotspot for election conspiracies after President Donald Trump lost the county to Joe Biden by about 45,000 votes, or 2 percent of the votes cast. The scrutiny of the vote count included official post-election audits as well as a partisan review of the results by an outside firm known as the Cyber Ninjas, which was hired by pro-Trump Republicans in the Arizona Senate. Each of the reviews confirmed Biden’s victory. Throughout it all, Gates weathered threats and harassment, later admitting he developed post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences.
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For decades, Gates has been an active Republican. In high school, he founded the Teenage Republican Club, and later he was an officer in the Iowa Federation of College Republicans. In the early 2000s, he served as a legislative district chair for the Arizona Republican Party and as the secretary of the Maricopa County Republican Committee. In 2006 and 2008, he led the Arizona Republican Party’s election integrity efforts, organizing groups of poll watchers and attorneys.
Outside of work, Gates is deeply involved in his community. With a law degree from Harvard Law School, he has been particularly active in law-related education, serving as a regional coordinator and attorney coach at both the high school and intercollegiate levels. Additionally, he is helping to organize the 2025 National High School Mock Trial Championship in Phoenix.
Gates has received various awards for his leadership and service, including the Maricopa County Bar Association's 2023 Public Lawyer of the Year award, the Ed Pastor 2023 Public Servant Award and the Truman Foundation's Joseph E. Stevens Public Service Award in 2022.
Since 2022, he has been part of Issue One’s Faces of Democracy campaign advocating for protections for election workers and for regular, predictable and sufficient federal funding of elections.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Issue One: How did you end up in this profession?
Bill Gates: I initially got involved about 20 years ago as a volunteer lawyer for the Republican Party. I would help to organize poll observers on Election Day. I first started in Navajo County, which is in northeastern Arizona, and then by 2006 and 2008, I was serving in this role for the Arizona Republican Party statewide.
After that, I ran for the Phoenix City Council and served there for seven years. And in 2016, I ran for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. In 2019, when I was the chair of the Board of Supervisors, we negotiated with the county recorder at that time, Adrian Fontes, to take back all of our statutory responsibilities. So now we have a collaborative effort in Maricopa County for how we run elections. With the 2020 and 2022 elections, I became fully involved in some fairly famous elections here and just had an incredible opportunity to work closely with everybody on the team. This really is my life's work.
IO: What part of the election administration story in Arizona do you think is not told or widely understood enough?
BG: I think that people do not understand the size of Maricopa County and the breadth of the effort to run an election here. We are actually the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country. We have about 2.5 million registered voters, so every time we run a countywide election, it involves thousands of individuals, including thousands of temporary employees.
People don’t understand that the people running these elections are your neighbors. It is your aunt. It is your uncle. It is your mother. That human element is really important.
IO: In your job, how have you worked to bring more transparency to the world of election administration?
BG: I would like to think that is something that we have excelled at in Maricopa County. Following the 2020 election, we could have gone in two different directions. We could have hidden in the corner and said we are just going to do our jobs and let the world go by. Or we could swing the doors open and shine a light on everything we have done, which is exactly what we have done.
We have absolutely transformed our communications system. In the 2022 election, working with the recorder, we held 16 press conferences before and after the election. As far as I know, that is the most election officials here have ever done. We knew the attention that was on us because we had a lot of high-profile statewide offices, and we had many candidates that had questioned the results of the 2020 election.
After the 2021 Cyber Ninja audit that the Arizona Senate started, they would share updates from the Cyber Ninjas, and for the most part, they were simply spewing misinformation. So we decided to transform our social media to live tweet as these statements were being made. We were live tweeting our responses and debunking the misinformation.
Also, we have swung the doors open to the community. We have held numerous tours of Maricopa County’s tabulation center. We bring people in here — and not just those who feel very comfortable with our election system and have no questions. We have opened it up to everyone, and that has been incredibly helpful in getting the word out. Finally, we have livestream cameras on our tabulation center running 24/7 so if people have questions about what is going on, they can sit in their house and watch it on their laptops. These are just some of the measures that we have made to expand that transparency. We are very fortunate in Maricopa County to have the resources to do those sorts of things.
IO: Why do you think that voters should have trust in election processes and results, specifically in Arizona?
BG: In the past few election cycles, it has taken approximately 10 to 13 days to complete the count. There are other states that take that long, but they do not have the close elections that we do. Our races may take several days because they are close and because of the processes. To dig into that a little bit more, people should have faith because we have eyes on everything — Republican eyes and Democratic eyes. If you are a Republican, you need to know there are advocates on behalf of your party, on behalf of your candidates, who are watching everything.
A lot of people think a hand count would be a solution to strengthen confidence. A hand count is not a feasible approach in a jurisdiction like ours with 2.5 million registered voters. A lot of people do not realize that we do hand counts as a part of the audit process in Maricopa County. We select a small but a statistically significant percentage of votes to hand count and if we see variances between the hand count and the machine count, then we expand the universe of votes that get hand counted. We just had a hand count audit in our primary election, and guess what? It came out exactly the same.
Various other transparency measures that we have, including the livestream cameras, make people feel good about our election results. I would argue that the 2020 and the 2022 elections were the most examined elections in our country's history, especially in Maricopa County. If there was something going on, we would know about it. Everyone would know about it.
If voters want to have more confidence in the process, take us up on our offer and come take a tour of our election facility. I’ve never had anybody walk out of that and say, “I feel worse about things than I did when I walked in this building.”
IO: In the United States, election administration is not centralized. Instead, 50 states have 50 different systems. In Arizona, both the county recorder and the director of elections play essential roles in administering elections. What are some key differences between the two roles? And how does the Board of Supervisors fit in?
BG: The county recorder is responsible for voter registration and vote by mail. Vote by mail now in Arizona is running around 85 percent in every election. A county’s director of elections, who reports to the Board of Supervisors, is responsible for all in-person voting, both in-person early voting and in-person on Election Day. In addition, the director of elections is responsible for the tabulation of votes. Finally, the Board of Supervisors is responsible for certifying the results of the election.
IO: Many people are surprised to learn that the federal government doesn’t routinely fund the costs of running elections. Why do you think the federal government should routinely contribute to election administration costs?
BG: In the United States, as opposed to many other countries, we run elections at the local level. This is a strength of our system, that those who are the closest to the people are running elections. For those who are concerned about alleged conspiracies to rig elections, it makes it a lot harder when you literally have thousands of jurisdictions.
For those of us who are in elections, like me in Maricopa County, where we are in 50 lines of business as the Board of Supervisors, that means our residents count on us for lots of services. It is unfair, and I would argue it is undemocratic to force us at the local level to make choices between things such as addressing the housing affordability issue, or making sure our elections are run efficiently, or making sure that our citizens are safe. In the end, this is a federal responsibility. The federal government should be providing sufficient resources so that elections can be run safely and accurately, and frankly so that the local jurisdictions can respond to all that misinformation that is out there.
IO: What is the price tag of running an election in your jurisdiction, and where does funding for election administration in your jurisdiction come from?
BG: Our residents in Maricopa County help fund our elections through taxes. We do also get some funding from the state. And sometimes, there will be funding that will come down from the federal government, but it is not something that we can rely upon.
While my colleagues and I always say that you cannot put a price tag on democracy, the price tag can run into the tens of millions of dollars to run an election here in Maricopa County.
IO: If your jurisdiction had extra funding, how would you spend it?
BG: We have needs from a capital perspective that we would spend it on. We have been in the same building now for decades. We are going to be building a new facility as our county continues to grow. We have been one of the fastest-growing counties in the country for years. Not only is it important that we have good facilities for our workers, but it’s also important that we have the space that we need.
We need a lot of space to run elections because we have a lot of people who are involved in all steps of the election process. We also need to build a facility that is built with transparency in mind. People who go into election administration do not do it to get rich, that is for sure, but we want to make sure that we can compensate these people who are doing such important jobs to a level that we can get the best and the brightest. So, I would use additional funding on capital, I would use it on people, and I would also, unfortunately, need to continue to invest in security for our facilities, our workers and our voters.
IO: Last year, you came to Washington, D.C., to meet with lawmakers and policymakers as a part of a bipartisan advocacy push organized by Issue One. What was that experience like for you and why was it so important to speak with members of Congress about issues like increased election funding and protections for election workers?
BG: I was very grateful to join other elections officials from across the country. That was one of the best parts, getting to meet people, and share experiences, best practices and challenges that we have faced in the past few years. There is nothing like being able to talk through that. It is very healthy and very informative to learn best practices from other election officials.
Going to Congress was a great experience. Our representatives in Congress are focused on so many issues every day. To have folks come in — particularly members of their own party, so for me, meeting with my fellow Republicans on the Hill — and telling them the experiences that we have had, the challenges we face, and for them to look us in the eyes and and see the passion that we have for elections, and for our workers, was extremely helpful, especially for Arizona.
You know, if you live in Delaware or something, it is just a short train ride to Washington, D.C., but for those of us in Arizona, it takes us a day to get to D.C. To be able to have that opportunity and the partnership of Issue One, we are so grateful for that. I certainly hope that down the road, this will make a difference and help members of Congress understand just how important that federal investment in local elections is.
IO: What’s your elevator pitch for why someone should work as a poll worker this year?
BG: There is no more important time to be a poll worker than right now, when we have folks who are raising questions — some legitimate, some illegitimate — about how our elections run. We need you to go out and evangelize in your community about what it means to work on elections, to be able to respond to a lot of the unfair criticisms out there.
If you have questions about elections, then I absolutely want you to volunteer as a poll worker, because then you can have those questions answered! And I am confident that you will have those questions answered!
And if you care about this election and feel strongly about one side or the other, I definitely want you to be involved, because if you have been involved, then you can have confidence that the results are accurate and that the election was run in a way that all of us as Americans can feel good about.
If you are on the edge, trying to decide whether to work as a poll worker, do it. It is not too late to get involved. Call your local elections office. [Editor’s note: Or visit PowerThePolls.org/IssueOne.]
The other thing to note is there are many types of jobs. Everyone thinks you are just checking in voters and handing them a ballot. But there are so many different jobs. Maybe you like to drive. In Maricopa County, we are really spread out. We have drivers who take supplies out to our vote centers.
IO: In 2023, you announced that you would not be running for reelection. Can you tell us how you came to this decision and what is next for you?
BG: Some people will say that I ran from this because of all the harassment, the death threats and things like that. That is absolutely not the case. This was a decision that I spent a lot of time making with my wife and our daughters. At the end of this year, it will be 15 years in elected office for me, between the Phoenix City Council and the Board of Supervisors. It felt like the right time to move on from this and to give someone else the opportunity to work on the Board of Supervisors, which by the way, is the best job in the world. I want people to understand I am not running away from elections or what has happened here. I have loved every minute of it.
I am moving on to Arizona State University, where I will be a professor in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. I will also be the executive director of the Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, so I am going to continue in this space and work with my colleagues to help train the next generation of election administrators and to help provide continuing education to those who are already in election administration. We look forward to convening experts both here in Arizona as well as at our Los Angeles and D.C. campuses, to have discussions about best practices, do research and help push back on misinformation. I am really excited about this next chapter.
IO: Outside of being passionate about running safe and secure elections, what are your hobbies, or what is a fun fact that most people might not know about you?
BG: I play golf. I love to hike here in Maricopa County on all of our beautiful trails. I love to watch movies with my wife and our girls. And I love listening to music. People probably do not know that I have a very wide range of musical tastes going from yacht rock to hip hop.
IO: What is your favorite book or movie?
BG: My favorite movie is “Somewhere In Time.” It is from the 1980s, and it is the story of Christopher Reeve going to the Grand Hotel in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and he falls in love with a woman in a picture from the early 20th century [played by Jane Seymour]. He must then travel through time to meet her. I am really into time travel.
IO: Which historical figure would you have most liked to have had an opportunity to meet?
BG: I am fascinated by the French Revolution. I would have loved to have met Robespierre and talked with him about that whole experience, the uplifting power of democracy and also its very ugly side.
