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Laura L. Thornton

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    Voting

    The case for election observation in the U.S.

    Laura L. Thornton
    January 18, 2022
    Election monitor in Cairo

    An election monitor looks on as woman casts a ballot in Egypt's 2018 presidential election.

    Salah Malkawi/ Getty Images

    Thornton is director and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

    The United States is in a dangerous place today, with 64 percent of Americans believing democracy is in crisis, mostly centered around the 2020 elections. According to the findings, this is due to the false belief that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, according to Republicans; but Democrats feel democracy is in danger because of this lie and resulting behavior, such as the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

    As I’ve said to small-d democrats elsewhere, without trust in elections, little else matters. You can have the cleanest, most professional exercise imaginable, but if a significant percentage of the population, or most of one of the major competing political parties, does not believe this, then democracy is in danger.

    Around the world, countries use election observation to help establish this trust. For 25 years, I lived overseas working for organizations promoting democracy, a key component of which was organizing both domestic — partisan and nonpartisan — and international election observation missions. Observation efforts can expose shortcomings and lead to ways to mitigate them. The main aim, however, is to ensure public trust in the election process and the legitimacy of the result, and thereby trust in democratic governance. The U.S. should do the same through domestic and international nonpartisan election monitoring.

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