“When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina,…”
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When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy. 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.
Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries 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.
That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy — Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project — all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy. The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.
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– Point of View: North Carolina no longer a democracy | News & Observer
(via dendroica)
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Tags: politics, a lot of this applies on the national level, throughout the obama presidency, his opposition has pursued the principle, that it's a win for their side, if he failed, and some of them, enough of them, were willing to hurt the country as a whole, in pursuit of that goal, nc is on the leading edge, but the tide is coming in everywhere, democracy is a seawall made of sand, if enough of us, are willing to gouge parts of it away, we all end up in the water.
