GQ interviews Andrew Reynolds regarding his claim that North Carolina is barely a functioning democracy. I found this remark a trifle devious:
The op-ed has gotten a lot of blowback. You’ve been accused of claiming that elections don’t work because Republicans win too much, and the EIP has drawn criticism for its methodology when North Korea scored oddly high in a 2014 assessment. Since then, the EIP has dropped North Korea from its sampling, but doesn’t this at the very least undermine North Carolina’s score?
I want us to focus on the reality of governance in North Carolina and the election process quality, and there’s no doubt that we have serious issues. So I think it’s a red herring to pick apart the actual number, whether it should be 57 or 59, whether Cuba ranks higher or lower, whether India ranks higher or lower—let’s focus on the fact that America and North Carolina have a serious challenge to the vibrancy of their democracy.
It’s almost like a nice distraction to get hung up on the quantitative methodology of this which prevents us from looking at the detailed reality of politics in this state and in other states. And I want to stress that the EIP—which I’m not involved in running, I was just involved in its founding—the EIP is not perfect. It gives us a good indicator, but you try and triangulate that with lots of other indicators. It’s helpful and probably the best assessment of election quality, but it’s not foolproof, it’s not the Bible, it’s just another way of thinking about what’s working and what isn’t working.
I view checking of various other countries’ rank on the scale as a way to “smoke test” the evaluation – does this make sense? Of course, some smoke tests turn out to be invalid, as they don’t reflect the underlying reality – or the assumed value of the particular smoke test is misunderstood. In other words, using their example, maybe North Korea is more of a functioning democracy than we think we know.
But I merely use that as an example. The fact that it scored high and then was dropped the next year needs an explanation – not a “focus on the real problem here!” response. To an engineer, at least a software guy like me, an anomalous result almost always signals a problem somewhere in the system; the fact that it may be harmless in one milieu doesn’t mean it’s harmless in all. I would have rather had almost any other response than that one – from “Here’s why this is irrelevant,” which would be informative and cool, to “well, they’re really good at xyz and we accord a lot amount of weight to xyz” to even just “we’re investigating that, but we don’t think it matters because …”. This response does not induce feelings of wellness in me.
Despite the obvious fact that at least half the political parties in North Carolina appear to be seriously broken. But that’s not really what they’re measuring; rather, they’re looking at the system, regardless of the parties.
