What if Other Countries Monitored U.S. Elections?

Supporters of restoring felons' voting rights march in Fort Lauderdale, Oct. 24, 2020 [Marta Lavandier/AP]

By Tony Karon

On Nov. 14, 2000, amid the debacle of a U.S. presidential election eventually decided by the Supreme Court, I wondered how the fiasco was playing out overseas.

“Most Russians giggled last week when the Communist Party tabled a resolution in the Duma demanding that independent observers monitor the U.S. election,” I wrote in a piece for Time. “But as of Wednesday, some were wondering whether the Reds had a point.” 

The use of outside election monitors is usually reserved for the Global South and Eastern Europe, and overseen by rich Western countries and NGOs that see themselves as arbiters of democracy. But the widespread expectation that President Donald Trump will use any means available to him to challenge an unfavorable result next month raises the specter of a corrupted result that echoes 2000. 

Could the U.S., in fact, benefit from international election monitors? What would happen if the democratic character of U.S. elections had to be certified in this way?

The Carter Center’s guidelines for international monitoring, which have been used to oversee elections in 24 countries over the past few decades, state that a “genuine election” requires “the right and opportunity to vote freely and to be elected fairly through universal and equal suffrage by secret balloting or equivalent free voting procedures, the results of which are accurately counted, announced and respected.”

Let’s see how the U.S. stacks up.

The ability to vote freely

Even before Election Day, monitors would have good reason to ask whether all U.S. citizens have the right and opportunity to vote freely. 

Put simply, they don’t – thanks to a concerted and growing effort over many years by Republican Party officials to prevent Black and brown folks from getting to the polls. This extends far beyond voting day. Citing a phantom menace of fraudulent voting, the GOP has leveraged their state-level majorities to place a thicket of legal and logistical obstacles between the ballot box and poorer Black and brown citizens: voter ID laws, a dysfunctional voter registration bureaucracy, reduced numbers of voting locations, etc.

Voter suppression has become a core strategy of a party that senses a demographic threat to its hold on power – and responds by rolling back the voting rights won by Black people in the bitter civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Any mechanisms that limit the access of citizens to the electoral process puts a country at odds with the basic requirements of democracy per the international monitoring system. And in a system whose arcane design (the Electoral College, in particular) means the presidency can be won or lost on the basis of less than 100,000 votes, such mechanisms can definitively influence the outcome.

Equal suffrage

A second set of alarms would be triggered for international monitors measuring U.S. compliance with the requirement of “universal and equal suffrage.” There, the U.S. falls short, again. Both the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate were structured to prevent majority rule, by allocating two seats to each state regardless of population. (And citizens in Washington, DC or Puerto Rico don’t even have a vote in that chamber.)

In the Electoral College, California has one seat for every 709,000 residents, while Wyoming has the same for every 193,000 residents. The distortions of “the will of the people” are pretty obvious.

Structural inequality in the value of the franchise is reinforced by some processes that monitors would be required to scrutinize under Article 5 of the observer guidelines: “specific processes (such as, delimitation of election districts, voter registration, use of electronic technologies and functioning of electoral complaint mechanisms).” Conscious efforts to redraw electoral districts in ways that dilute the value of votes expected to go to the rival party has long been a mainstay of Republican electoral strategy (though Democrats have been known to do their own version). Oh, and safeguards in the Voting Rights Act to avoid such obvious racial bias in drawing districts were overturned in 2013 by the Supreme Court.

Accurate vote counting

Then there’s “results accurately counted, announced and respected” – let’s just say the track record is patchy. The Republican strategy to end the 2000 deadlock was to go all-out to stop the accurate counting of votes, and the GOP is already working in courtrooms across the country to prevent a complete count of the vote. Taken together with Trump’s admission that he is defunding the U.S. Postal Service in order to hobble its ability to deliver Americans’ mailed-in ballots and a number of his statements declining to necessarily accept the results and telling his supporters that an adverse result would, in itself, signal fraud would trigger alarm bells for international monitors.

Failed elections?

To recap: Even before voting day, our international observers would have serious concerns.  

In fact, an observer mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe issued a preliminary report last week citing some of those concerns, including:

• the wide variation in voting laws and practices determined – more often than not in partisan fashion, often at the expense of voters of color – by state-level governments

• the hundreds of cases already in courts across the country challenging voting rights and outcomes amid this complex and somewhat chaotic system – and the highly politicized judicial system that will decide those cases

• the lack of a single, independent, federal election authority

• the many limitations on the right of citizens to vote

Despite the fancies of a political class that has long imagined itself the global headquarters of democracy, in the way that Moscow was once the global headquarters of communism, even such allied observers as the Economist Intelligence Unit have, for some time, characterized the U.S. as a “flawed democracy.”

Of course, the Constitution was written by and for wealthy white men who feared “excessive democracy.” They didn’t envision an inclusive polity that would give voting rights to women, to Black people, or even to white men who owned no land. Such democratic rights as all Americans have today were won in centuries of struggle that forced those in power to take a more inclusive view of the Constitution. And it would be hard for any foreign observer mission to avoid the reality that it is that struggle, being waged with renewed intensity in the face of a sustained GOP revanche, that forms the backdrop for Election 2020.

And now we ask, should the U.S. invade...itself?

---

You might also enjoy