Election integrity: How do we compare?

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President Trump signed an executive order on May 10 to review alleged voter fraud and voter suppression in the United States. He believes that “3 million to 5 million votes were cast suspiciously in 2016 from undocumented immigrants, people registered in more than one state or dead people and that’s why he lost the popular vote.”

Vice President Pence shall chair the Commission, which will be composed of not more than 15 additional members. President Trump will select the remaining members.

The Brennan Center for Justice lists nearly 100 officials who refute the claims of voter fraud in the most recent presidential election. Several studies have debunked such claims, and in one article, “Elected officials, election administrators, experts, and leaders from across the political spectrum have spoken out against these untrue allegations.”

In their own words, they refute the claims of voting fraud – and most of those quoted are from Republicans including Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Jeff Flake, Congressman Jason Chaffetz, Senator John McCain and others. Though viewed by Democrats as an effort to divert attention from other issues challenging the president, such accusations must be taken seriously.

In Ohio, Secretary of State Jon Husted’s staff identified 821 non-citizens registered to vote and 126 who had cast ballots since 2013. He responded, “In light of the national discussion about illegal voting it is important to inform our discussions with facts. The fact is voter fraud happens. It is rare and when it happens, we hold people accountable… The 82 [illegal] votes cast amount to .0014 percent of the 5,607,641 total votes in November 2016.”

The last time a similar accusation was made was during the Bush administration in 2002. President George W. Bush’s attorney General John Ashcroft made finding voting fraud a top priority for the Department of Justice.

According to the Brennan Center in 2006, after failed findings, Ashcroft’s successor, Mr. Gonzales was told by Karl Rove that he had “concerns” about voter fraud and the search was revived. After failing to find cases of fraud, “Seven United States attorneys were forced to resign, on top of two more pushed out earlier.”

Just how much integrity does our electoral system have when measured on such issues as “appropriate conduct of election, during the pre-election state, the campaign, polling day and the election aftermath compare to other democracies in the world?”

Two universities investigated this and the findings are striking.

The undertaking is called the Electoral Integrity Project and the instrument they used is referred to as the Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI). The method used is similar to that used by similar perception studies (Transparency International for instance) in that PEI interviews political experts (university professors) about various aspects of elections in the area where they live.

The universities that conducted this research were Harvard University and Sydney University in Australia (interestingly, neither of these countries ranked high in election integrity).

“The 2015 annual Year in Election report compares the risks of flawed and failed election, and looks at how well countries around the world meet international standards. The report gathers assessments from over 2,000 experts to evaluate the perceived integrity of all 180 national, parliamentary and presidential contests held between July 1, 2012, and Dec. 31, 2015, in 139 countries. These include 54 national elections held last year.”

In the presidential election of 2012 the U.S. ranked 60th out of 180 elections worldwide, close to Bulgaria, Mexico and Argentina. In the 2014 U.S. congressional election we ranked 65th out of 180 elections worldwide.

Interestingly, many newer democracies such as Lithuania (fourth), Costa Rica (sixth) and Slovenia (eighth) performed much better than the U.S. When compared to the 20 or so developed and wealthy countries, the U.S. is ranked dead last.

Why did the U.S. score so poorly? Several reasons are given including the following …

Probably the most important failure is the problem of gerrymandering – the determination of boundaries for political regions. Since the determination for this is generally left up to the political party currently in power, it is very easy to draw lines that favor their own party.

Another commonly identified problem with our electoral system is the role played by money.

In a recent study people were asked if they thought money played too much of a role in elections and about two-thirds agreed.

A third weakness identified is the lack of consistency in voting related issues from state to state. Such issues as voter identification varies a great deal and efforts to restrict registration and voting has led to categories of people who are too often left out of the system (especially ethnic minorities and the poor).

To this list of our electoral weaknesses one could add the utilization of the Electoral College and the domination of elections by two parties which make it virtually impossible for smaller parties to participate.

These criticisms are serious and do call attention to the question of integrity in our electoral system. Many these criticisms of our system will be dismissed as so much academic double-talk.

It would be quite easy to agree with this except for the fact that these findings are consistent with other studies undertaken in this country as well as other countries that find our elections lacking in integrity.

The authors of this project point to other studies like those at Freedom House and Polity which produce similar findings.

Elections with questionable integrity call into question the very foundations of democracy!

Neil Snarr is Professor Emeritus at Wilmington College.

Neil Snarr

Contributing columnist

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