On this thread, this is a rather amazing article from The News & Observer, entitled “North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy.” It’s not hyperbole – the author, Andrew Reynolds, is a political science professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who helped found the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP). First, about EIP:
… my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.
And so what happens? He’s asked to evaluate the North Carolina elections.
In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.
Well, we knew North Carolina and its GOP were a special place – but at this juncture maybe it’s a special needs place. I’m not quite sure what “integrity of the voting district boundaries” might mean, but …
… no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.
The professor is, I think, outraged, and has a prescription. Here’s one of the points:
Last, elected officials need to respect the core principles of democracy – respect the will of the voters, all the voters and play the game with integrity.
Integrity, meaning respect for your opponents.
Meanwhile, I am quite happy I’m not a user of the cloud, such as Amazon Web Services. How does that connect to the North Carolina issue?
Because a state that does not respect democratic principles generally doesn’t have principles at all, and that would mean any confidential data in the cloud that happens to be stored on computers located in North Carolina – a state with a certain amount of technology companies, such as Wells Fargo – is only as safe as technology can make it, not as safe as the law can make it.
And that’s important.
Of course, the GOP will scream foul, but this is a respected political science professor, not some obviously biased report. Sure, he could have a hidden agenda, but that would have to be revealed to invalidate this finding.
And as this sinks in, it’ll be interesting to see if the corporate world takes notice and pushes North Carolina to resume democratic ideals. Since the GOP has abandoned democratic principles, they are left with the only fuel for their own self-respect, at least in the secular world, being prestige, and in the United States there’s a significant amount of prestige associated with having big corporations in your State. If they start walking away, the state and the GOP, the responsible political entity of the last decade, will lose prestige.
A lot of it.
State legislators of the GOP persuasion may wish to postpone trips outside of North Carolina until they clean up this mess.
