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

Senators’ credibility will be judged alongside Trump’s Cabinet picks

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be secretary of health and human services, visited the Capitol on Dec. 19.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Senators’ credibility will be judged alongside Trump’s Cabinet picks

There are roughly 1,200 positions in the federal government that require Senate confirmation, including the senior officials who make up the president’s Cabinet. The first Cabinet official was confirmed in 1789 when the Senate unanimously approved President George Washington’s nomination of Alexander Hamilton to be treasury secretary.

The confirmation or denial process is a matter of 100 senators making judgement calls to determine whether a nominee is professionally qualified, exhibits leadership skills, is ethically fit, is morally just, doesn’t carry “baggage” and has the temperament for the job.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the Oval Office
President-elect Donald Trump and President Joe Biden meet in the Oval Office on Nov. 13.
Jabin Botsford /The Washington Post via Getty Images

Why distrust in powerful politicians is part of a functioning democracy

Surveys suggest that in many western democracies, political trust is at rock bottom. Scandals, corruption, faltering economies, conspiracy theories and swirling disinformation are all playing their part. But is it really such a bad thing for people living in a democracy to distrust their government?

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we talk to political scientist Grant Duncan about why he  thinks a certain level of distrust and skepticism of powerful politicians is actually healthy for democracy. And about how populists, like Donald Trump, manage to use people’s distrust in political elites to their advantage.

Keep ReadingShow less
Fulcrum Democracy Forum logo

Meet the change leaders

As the year ends, we’d like to share with you more than 40 interviews The Fulcrum produced in conjunction with CityBiz for the “Fulcrum Democracy Forum – Meet the Change Leaders” series.

The Fulcrum and CityBiz, a publisher of news and information about business, power, money, politics and people in 21 major U.S. markets, produced these insightful interviews with an array of talented democracy change leaders. The videos were shared nationally with thousands of CityBiz subscribers and across its social media channels. The podcasts have also been published in The Fulcrum and distributed through the Coffee Party/Citizen Connect social media platform with 970,000 followers.

Keep ReadingShow less
AI Elon Musk wielding a gavel
AI image created by Grok

Musk for speaker of the House? It’s not as crazy as it seems.

On Dec. 19, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) floated the idea of Elon Musk being the speaker of the House after the billionaire tech businessman publicly opposed a bipartisan bill to avert a government shutdown.

As crazy as that might sound, some fellow Republicans support the idea, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.). She said that shewould be open to supporting Musk for speaker, an idea proposed by other Republicans as Congress barrelled towards government shutdown Friday night.

Keep ReadingShow less