Dr. Pippa Norris, a lecturer in comparative politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has taught at Harvard for three decades. She is also the founding director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Dr. Norris has published almost 50 books. She is ranked the second-most-cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google Scholar. She has served as the director of Democratic Governance Group at the United Nations Development Programme in New York and is an expert consultant for many international bodies. Speaking at the Department of State Foreign Press Centres’ hybrid briefing on the midterm elections, which was attended by United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU, Dr. Norris explains why the U.S. election and issues of election integrity. Excerpts:
Confidence in public service
If you have professional, independent public servants who are in these offices who are nonpartisan, as we do in Sweden and in many other countries, then in fact you have a confidence in your public service, then you have confidence in the way the elections is run. As soon as you put partisans in charge, then you’re introducing a weakness, and this is a longstanding weakness. It’s the way that American elections have been run for years and years. The problem is that as the Republican Party has become more into election denial, that has been basically a touchstone of faith in order to get selected and nominated in the party because of the grassroots and the primary process, so we’ve got more and more election deniers in office.
And again, the only reason, really, why 2020 worked was because even Republican officials were able to stand up and they expected certain norms and responsibilities of their job to uphold the law and to make sure that if they felt that the election was working well – for example, in Georgia – and then they felt that they should declare the results, and the courts backed them up. If that goes – if that norm disappears because election deniers become secretaries of state responsible for running elections, and they exercise their power in ways which are partisan in a very explicit way, then we’re going to end up with disputed outcomes.
And as I said, all you need is one or two states which are the swing states to do that, and immediately nobody’s going to agree on the outcome. And given what we’ve already known about January the 6th, given what we know about the potential for violence, given what we know about the organization, for example, of the Proud Boys and other local disputes after the last election, this is the fundamental problem facing us, I think, in the next two rounds. And it’s what keeps me up at night. It’s what really makes me concerned.
So, it’s a combination of a structural weakness, the way these elections are decentralised; a structural weakness in the way that they’re partisan; and then the added pressures of claims both of fraud from the Republicans and the appointment of election deniers. And it feels to me as though we’re like the Titanic heading toward the iceberg. We can all see this iceberg. We know what’s going to happen and we can’t turn it around.
The Democrats haven’t managed to put effective legislation. There was a great bill, H.R. 1, where they tried to improve electoral administration and didn’t manage it. And as a result, even though everybody knows that this is a fundamental problem, we’re just heading there. And 2020, 2022, 2024 is a fundamental challenge.
The structural issues are taken for granted in America in a way that they’re not in many other countries. If you look at the countries in particular which have gone through major reforms, a lot of countries have introduced an official electoral management body in only recent years, one which is independent, is a quango, is at arm’s length from the government.
The United Kingdom is an example of that. Twenty years ago, it used to be that elections were run by local authorities, and then the Blair administration introduced a national election body for Wales, Scotland, and for England. That is now being revised in the UK. There’s actually a new report that just came out yesterday about the electoral management body and its role and what it should be doing and so on. But you have an EMB, and most countries around the world have an EMB.
But because of the Constitution, the responsibilities for elections is seen as primarily the responsibilities of states, and the partisanship of, again, the public service in America means that partisanship is just taken for granted and Americans don’t even understand the structural differences between the United States and most other countries because they don’t look abroad. They don’t look at how elections work in other countries at all, really, because they’re focused so much on their own country in many, many ways.
So – and also, by the way, they don’t look abroad because they take for granted democracy. They think America is democracy, we’re a beacon of hope for the rest of the world, and so people should be emulating us versus us emulating Canada. And I think one of the primary things that we need to do after the election is to bring together some of the core electoral management bodies from comparable post-industrial societies and talk amongst ourselves and bring them in contact with the American officials.
There’s a very good – there is still a very good set of electoral officials in office, and they’re working very hard and they’re often under-resourced, and they have been there often for many years doing the same work. They’re not all partisans in a very direct way, but that’s being eroded. And local officials are being threatened and people are leaving the job because why would you be a public servant if you’re going to get threats to yourself and to your family and to your home. This is outrageous behavior that we’re now moving into because we’re so polarised.
And older poll workers, by the way, this is the background of the local polling station – when you go into a polling station, it’s all volunteers. But they’re primarily in – people who have retired. And those people are not willing to do the – to volunteer for this job if they feel that either they’re being threatened or they’re just given no thanks for this rather thankless task, et cetera.
So, the quality of electoral administration is going down. And if you want to look at the number of election deniers who are standing as secretary of state and in other offices, then the New York Times has got a very good document quite recently which has looked exactly at the numbers. And it’s, I think, around the number – about two-thirds of the Republican candidates are election deniers, depending on how you define them. So, it’s an awful lot.
And again, I shouldn’t dispute the fact that there are still very good public officials in office trying to do their best and committed to electoral integrity fully and committed to having a good service, but polarization is just so bad that they haven’t been able to necessarily win office for the next time. So, they’re being replaced increasingly by candidates who will be in favor of denial. And in Nevada, in Arizona, in Wisconsin, in Georgia, we’re going to get lots and lots of disputes.
The American – the American democracy held up in 2020 and 2016 because of informal democratic norms, not because of the law. It held up because people were willing to uphold certain standards. And if those norms have eroded, which they have, then you can’t guarantee that the law in itself is strong enough in order to protect us and protect electoral integrity.
I’m sorry to sound so negative or whatever, you know.
Voter ID
I am bipartisan in the sense that I believe that you should have voter ID. I see no problem in that. If you look at a case like India, you have 800 million voters, all of whom have voter ID. They have a photo ID and they have their photo and their name. They go to the polling place, and there is the list of who can vote, and there is the photos so that people can immediately be identified one against the other
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In America, however, the problem is cultural traditions and norms. And so, in particular, people are so suspicious of voter suppression because the history of civil rights primarily, and therefore the problems for the communities of color but also for other issues of voter suppression, which have been there historically for many years in certain – in certain states. And so people have been anti-voter ID. There’s also a libertarian tradition in America, which is against voter ID in principle. So, for those reasons, people have pushed back.
But my ideal, if I could get it together, would be to bring together the key actors in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to say, look, what reforms on both sides could be seen actually to be a compromise, that – where we could come together and find a more effective way of running American elections? And a simple idea would be yes, on the one hand, Republicans demand voter ID; okay, let’s go with that. If we can do it at no cost to the voter so it’s automatically available, it’s free, and everybody can have the same photo ID, or we simply use whatever ID already officially available, normally driver’s licenses.
On the other hand, for the Democrats, I’d say, maybe the Republicans could agree to things like uniform opening times. Why should it be that one area should have opening for your polls from, say, 8:00 to 6:00; another one should have it from 10:00 to 9:00; and there are different ways of running elections, and all those local details in different areas. And I would also reform a number of – many other aspects of elections where, again, I think there could be some bipartisan areas of agreement.
And you might think that the hours in which a polling station opens is trivial. It isn’t. If you have people who move about the country and they don’t know what time their polling station is open, of course turnout is going to go down. I would also argue that we should have things like weekend voting, as many other countries do, so that it’s much more flexible, and that we have a variety of other standard practices, which give something to the Democrats and something to the Republicans.
The problem is, of course, we’re so polarised in America and the issue has become poison so that having any sort of agreement, even on basic principles, has become almost impossible. And maybe if we have a crisis, that is an opportunity to reform. Maybe it was sort of like Florida, that highlighted these issues so much in 2000 that we got the Help America Vote Act and money from Congress to improve the quality of elections in 2002. Maybe we have to have the same crisis before we can actually get to any sort of effective outcome. But that’s a kind of positive spin. And it’s entirely likely also that the more the crisis, the worse things get because we lose trust on both sides of the aisle.
What Americans say about their ranking on election integrity
So, we’re – rather like the Corruption Integrity Index, what we try to do as an organisation is give you your independent evaluations, and then we let people on the ground use it as they wish. So, for example, in Pennsylvania, you know it’s been one of the major areas of controversy. We showed the weaknesses and the strengths of the Pennsylvania elections according to our experts, and then a number of advocacy groups took this up and have proposed a number of legislative reforms which they felt could be appropriate. We’re not there to tell the state how they should run their elections. That would be totally inappropriate.
But we are there to say, if you compare America with the world, America is not doing well even though we’ve always assumed that America was a beacon of light for democracy, but not so much on elections. And if you compare your state, we do see some positives and we also see some negatives. We also see areas that every single state should improve, and I’d highlight things like media and money. Media in particular is fundamentally a problem because of the lack of balance, ever since Reagan got rid of the balance requirements for television news during a campaign.
And money is – again, very little debate, or serious debate, other than particular advocacy organizations about the role of money in politics. But the amount of money being spent, like I said, has doubled between 2018 and 2022, according to some of the organizations who are tracking expenditure on political advertising expenditures and so on. And you can look at those quite easily. And dark money is a problem. In particular, many of the donors are also election deniers, which means that those candidates have to be accountable to their donors, and that’s why you get certain candidates who are successful and other candidates who aren’t, in the primary process.
So, we need to reframe the problems. It’s not the problems which, in fact, either the Republicans or the Democrats argue are the key issues. It’s not voter suppression, I’d argue, primarily. It’s not voter fraud. That’s a myth. But there are fundamental weaknesses that America should address. And if you want a model of what could have been done, if you google H.R. 1, which was the big attempt which was – came through to the Senate to be debated I think two years ago now, or maybe it was just one year ago now, that had a comprehensive set of reforms. It was really a good bill, and it got absolutely nowhere because of the lack of a two-thirds majority, and it wasn’t even seriously debated. And maybe it overloaded the number of reforms, but nevertheless that for me is a great model of reform which America should address. But whether or not any reforms get through will depend on the outcome of the elections, so we’re in the vicious cycle in American elections right now.
Foreign interference
Foreign interference was very much a challenge in the 2020 presidential elections. Interestingly, while I have seen some initiatives in order to try to improve cybersecurity, there’s been almost no discussion of that in the media, in the midterm elections. And I think that there are some important reasons why that might be the case. But in 2020 – I mean 2016, of course, there were real questions, as there were in Europe, about challenges to domestic media and the ways in which, in particular, Facebook and other social media had interference by people in particular who were from other countries but posing as average Americans, but – essentially spreading hate speech and very negative images of both parties – but primarily of the Democratic Party.
I think that what’s happened is that since then, the social media in America have really learnt some of those lessons. Facebook set up a big unit in order to monitor election coverage, and it changed some of its policies. Twitter has done much the same. And there are obviously many, many other social media outlets which are available, but I think that we’ve learnt some of the lessons about foreign interference through social media in covert ways, which means that it hasn’t been as much of an issue so far in the election of 2020.
It is entirely possible, however, that it might come back for 2024. In particular, for example, as you might have heard, Elon Musk is talking about taking over Twitter, and one of the things he proposes to do is to reduce some of the filtering which is going on, including a lot of the staff. He’s proposing a 75 percent staff cutting at Twitter, and the staff are very much part of the monitoring units which have been seeing if there is interference either in this issue or in other forms of conspiracy, because there are many other conspiracy theories which are – which obviously are spreading as well.
So, I think social media has temporarily caught up, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to act as an effective filter. And this is still a major threat to the quality of the information, and misinformation and disinformation, of course, is being as spread as much by domestic sources as it is by foreign sources. So that’s – that hasn’t changed, but it doesn’t necessarily need to come from abroad because basically there’s enough conspiracy theorists in America to spread it all by ourselves.
Institution of election police in Florida
The governor has basically tried to make this a big issue, and the problem is that it’s been a very politicised issue when he claims that there’s widespread fraud, and he’s brought 20 cases in particular before the court to try to prosecute, and these are often cases, when you look at the detail, which have arisen primarily through error and mistakes. People thought that they could vote because they were sent a ballot card, when in practice they can’t because of their past penal – they had some issues with the law in the past and so on. There’s very, very few cases of intentional voter fraud which are being prosecuted, either in Florida or around the country for that matter.
And the electoral police, I think, is a symbolic gesture, again, as a kind of gesture to say: look, we are concerned about fraud and we’re doing something about fraud. But reality is that there really isn’t a fundamental problem according to the courts and according to the evidence that’s been brought before the courts. So, it’s more symbolic politics. I personally don’t have a problem with using effective security around polling places. I don’t even have a problem even with using things like identity cards, which are not used in America but they are used in many other countries like India. I think that ensuring integrity so that people have confidence in elections is fine; that’s not a problem. It becomes a problem if you allow that to turn into any form of pressure on voters so they don’t feel comfortable going to the polls or they feel that they might be discriminated against or they feel that their private act of voting might be becoming public.
And it’s not so much the election police which I think to be a problem – although it’s just a waste of money – it’s more that in many states they’re allowing poll watchers from a very partisan perspective to get into an area of the polling booth – a polling station, sorry – which I think is inappropriate. If you’re being scrutinized by people, and they’re wearing t-shirts which are very partisan – although that’s banned; sometimes it’s not – then voters don’t feel as comfortable going to the polls. And we should make sure that there’s a cordon sanitaire, that there’s clear area which in many states there is a law that says any poll watchers or any security forces have to be within a certain distance of the actual privacy of the polls. I think that’s good practice in every country. And I think it’s something that we should do in Florida as well as all the other states as well. But it can be a form of intimidation, Jan, absolutely.