A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would

happen if, instead of flying to Zambia, Venezuela, or East Timor, his respected
international election-monitoring team turned its attention to the United States. His
answer: the shortcomings of the system were so egregious that his colleagues at the
Carter Center would never agree to such a thing. We wouldnt think of it, he said. The
American political system wouldnt measure up to any sort of international standards.
The former president reeled off four examples of what he meant: the lack of a nonpartisan
central electoral commission to establish standards and approve voting equipment; the
lack of uniformity in voting rules across the country, or even within individual states; the
absence of a media environment in which candidates for office were offered equal air
time free of charge, as happened routinely in most other mature democracies; and the
failure of much of the countrys voting equipment to provide for meaningful recounts.
He could have added many more items to the list: the lack of accurate voter lists and the
politicization of trying to amend them; the multiple obstacles to voter registration,
leading to the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of eligible voters, including several
million who want to cast a ballot in any given election season but find they cannot; the
disenfranchisement of more than five million felons and ex-felons, in violation of the
1990 Copenhagen Document to which the United States is a signatory; the gross lack of
competitiveness in congressional and state legislative races due to the distorting effects of
campaign money, partisan gerrymandering, and the vast advantages of incumbency; the
continuing pattern of discrimination and exclusion of African Americans, Native
Americans, Hispanic Americans, new voters, students, and the poor; the lack of voting
machines in many low-income neighborhoods, leading to impossibly long lines on
Election Day and further de facto disenfranchisement; and the failure to police obvious
conflicts of interest, to the point where election managers at county and state levels can
be in charge of races in which they are themselves candidates oras happened in Florida
in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004are entrusted with certifying the results of a presidential
vote after playing a leading partisan role in the campaign.
Carter did in fact say more as soon as the 2004 election was over. The following year, he
teamed up with James Baker, seasoned confidant to four Republican presidents, in a
worthy but ultimately ill-fated effort to institute meaningful across-the-board reform that
both major political parties could embrace. Sadly, the parties were in no mood to find
common ground, on voting rights or anything else, and the only lasting legacy of the
Carter-Baker commission was to help unleash a torrent of restrictive voter ID laws in
Republican-controlled statesa development Carter came to abhor because of its
discriminatory effect on African American voters.
By 2015, the former president was so exasperated he described the United States in
another radio interview as just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery. He was
talking, specifically, about the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision, which
had lifted all limits on so-called independent expenditures by corporations, unions, and
other special interests supporting candidates for office. Weve just seen a complete
subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors who want and expect
and sometimes get favors for themselves after the elections over, he said. The

incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great
benefit to themselves. Somebody whos already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an
avid contributor than somebody whos just a challenger.
Not so long ago, the corruptions and inadequacies of the American electoral system were
close to a taboo subject, rarely discussed by political candidates or the mainstream media
and recognized only by insiders and by those votersminorities and the poorwith
firsthand experience of the obstacles routinely thrown in their path. Often it took an
outsider with no illusions about some impossibly idyllic democratic American past to see
things more clearly. Absolutely everything is a violation! the chair of South Africas
Independent Electoral Commission, Brigalia Bam, exclaimed during a tour of Florida in
2004. All these different systems in different counties with no accountability. . . .
Its like the poorest village in Africa.
Dr. Bam was, admittedly, basing her judgment on the state long recognized as the basket
case of American election management. Shed spent several days in Florida listening to
stories of voter intimidation, attempted suppression of the black vote, slapdash polling
station procedures, and substandard voting machines that lost or miscounted votes. Then
again, 2004 was a relatively good year in Floridas recent electoral history, thanks to the
introduction of provisional and early voting in response to the disasters of four years
earlier, as well as some movement toward giving the vote back to ex-felons who had
completed their probation and parole periods.
Had Bam returned eight or ten years later, she would have found that many of these
progressive reforms had been either halted or reversed and that more than 10
percent of Floridas voting-age population were now excluded from voting because of
a past criminal conviction. (The national average is about 2.5 percent.)7 Many voting
rights groups in the Sunshine State would have told her that instead of going out into the
field and seeking to solve problems with registration or absentee balloting, as they had in
2004, they had all but given up fieldwork because of dizzying new restrictions that
penalized even high school civics teachers seeking to register their eighteen-year-old
students.
Regrettably, Florida is no longer an outlier. American democracy as a whole is
experiencing its biggest backslide in more than a century. Where once it was the
Democratic Party that perpetuated the most egregious inequalities and disregarded the
civil rights of whole classes of voters, now it is an ascendant Republican Party that is
using the language of reform and commonsense theft and fraud prevention to whip up
its supporters and wage a furious war of attrition against voters it has identified as
loyalists for the other sideminorities, recent immigrants, young people, and the poor.
Some voters have allowed themselves to be buffeted by great gusts of partisan outrage
and even to cheer on the malfeasance, as long as it benefits their side. Many more
feel overwhelmed by apathy or disgust.
The backslide has only been exacerbated by some truly disastrous rulings by the U.S.
Supreme Court, starting with the notorious Bush v. Gore decision that ended the 2000

election without resorting to anything so vulgar as counting the votes. Citizens United
made it possible for special interests on both sides of the political aisle to buy candidates,
poison the airwaves with distorted negative advertising, and effectively buy all but the
highest-profile races at national, state, and local levels. Shelby County v. Holder
(2013) dismantled a vital part of the Voting Rights Act that for almost half a century had
given the Justice Department the power to police new election laws in states and counties
with
a track record of discrimination; the ruling has emboldened several states, especially in
the South, to amp up their election laws to a degree of repressiveness unseen since the
segregation era.
The United States was the first country in the world to embrace democratic rights as we
now understand them, the first to see mass participation in the political life of its rural
townships and emerging big cities. No country has been as vocal about the vibrancy of its
democracy, or lectured the world more zealously about following its example. And yet,
the health of that democracy has been repeatedly undermined by corrupt institutions,
dirty elections, and extraordinary bursts of voter manipulation and suppression. How
come? The answer has a lot to do with the way racism was hardwired into the system
from the beginning, and also a lot to do with the way those heady ideals have butted up at
key moments against powerful economic and political forces with no interest in living up
to them. Most strikingly, the question of who gets to vote has never been fully
settled and, for that reason, has never gone away.