Special Report

When it comes to election systems, the United States isn’t all Floridas and Ohios. There are, in fact, a number of states that tend to run their elections well, through trusted systems and voter-friendly procedures. They don’t grab the attention of journalists and reformers precisely because they rarely produce newsworthy controversies and snafus. Reform experts […]

For election officials in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, November 2 had passed with merciful ease. The balloting was deemed an administrative success — until two days later, that is, when election workers noticed a mathematical oddity: As they canvassed more votes, the tallies in certain races had decreased. After some hand-wringing, election officials discovered that the […]

Warren Rudman has spent years perfecting the art of bipartisanship. Called a “consensus-forging leader” by Senator Olympia Snowe, Rudman, who served two terms as a U.S. senator from New Hampshire (1980– 92), is well-known for his role in bipartisan deficit reduction and, more recently, for his work on the United States Commission on National Security, […]

Judging from the views of my respected co-authors in this report, American democracy stands indicted for its performance in November’s election. Yet in several important respects, the system performed better in 2004 than it has in years. That’s not easy for me to say after such a disheartening election day. But you cannot measure the […]

The tactics are more subtle than in the old days, but suppression of votes in minority neighborhoods is very much alive and well.

Shortly after the McCain-Feingold bill passed Congress in 2002, the smart money was all on the big money: Mega-wealthy donors to the new “527s” would dominate the new political era just as they had dominated the last. Sure enough, such progressive donors as George Soros did make huge contributions to the 527s. But the smart […]

There’s reason to be optimistic about the prospects for reform. Here’s why.

Americans know the 2000 election was a fiasco. What they don’t know is that the 2004 election, in many ways, might have been even worse. The purported margin of victory in November has led many to believe that the process went relatively smoothly. But the appearance of a smooth election obscured troubling developments, from simple […]

Few noticed, but in the year 2000, Mexico and the United States traded places. After nearly two centuries of election fraud, Mexico’s presidential election was praised universally by its political parties and international observers as free, fair, and professional. Four months later, after two centuries as a model democracy, the U.S. election was panned as […]

Thirty years ago, the national movement for universal preschool came heart-breakingly close to success. But Richard Nixon’s 1971 veto of such a measure — it “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach” — proved to be Washington’s last […]