Rick Hasen on our Voting System

A reading recommendation for anyone who missed it, Rick Hasen’s piece in the NYT:  Don’t Let Our Democracy Collapse.

He concludes as follows, but I would very much encourage a read of the whole piece:

The future is scary. Public confidence in the fairness of the election process is already largely driven by who wins and who loses. State and local election officials need to overcome partisanship and resistance in areas where they can cooperate, and we need to support organizations that foster that. It may not sound sexy, but our democracy is counting on them.

FILED UNDER: Democracy, US Politics,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. george says:

    Sounds like team sports. How do you know the referees were fair? Your team won.

    What’s kind of amusing is that even though Trump won, he’s still calling the process unfair – because he lost the popular vote. Kind of a different approach, since claiming the voting process was tainted automatically brings his own electoral victory into doubt … which is why most winning teams (in sport and politics) are happy to conclude the process was fair.

  2. CSK says:

    @george:

    You’re giving Trump credit for being able to discern that he’s questioning his
    own win, and Trump lacks that ability. This is the way he thinks, if you can call it that:

    Trump never loses.
    Clinton won the popular vote.
    Therefore, Clinton cheated.

  3. M. Bouffant says:

    Our “democracy” has never been one. The Senate & the Electoral College are both un-democratic institutions. Throw in House gerrymandering, where more votes are cast nationally for Democratic candidates, yet Republicans have a majority, & you’ll realize that we have a hell of a fight before us just to get an actual, functioning democracy.