Make America Boring Again, Fix Its Dated Electoral System
The U.S. could adopt a few easy reforms—and a few tough ones—to take the drama out of its democracy.
Canadians voted for a new parliament last year in a poll organized—from sea to shining sea—by a single, nonpartisan federal agency known as Elections Canada. Lines outside polling stations in ethnic minority communities weren’t hours longer than elsewhere. There were no opaque torrents of cash flowing into unlimited campaign coffers, no warnings of mass fraud, no confusion over varied voting rules, no toxic debates about voter ID requirements. It was, in a word, dull. That’s something few would say of the presidential vote next door in the U.S. And when it comes to the internal mechanics of democratic elections, dull is good.
Americans take pride in having the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. But even if Donald Trump’s threats to challenge the count or its outcome should go unfulfilled, the 2020 presidential election has cruelly exposed structural flaws that mark the U.S. electoral system as among the weakest of any advanced democracy. If that sounds unduly harsh, it shouldn’t. A surprising amount of data gets collected on the wider process of holding elections, and for Americans, it makes brutal reading.