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Conservative activists across America are pushing efforts to review the 2020 vote more than six months after the election, a move experts say is a dangerous attempt to continue to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election that strikes at the heart of Americas democratic process.

Encouraged by an ongoing haphazard review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona, activists are pushing to review votes or voting equipment in California, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the powerful speaker of the state house of representatives recently hired ex-law enforcement officers, including one with a history of supporting Republicans, to spend the next three months investigating claims of fraud. At least one of the officers hired has a history of supporting GOP claims. The announcement also came after state officials announced they found just 27 cases of potential fraud in 2020 out of 3.3m votes cast.

The reviews are not going to change the 2020 election results or find widespread fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, the conservative activists behind the effort many of whom have little election experience have championed the reviews as an attempt to assuage concerns the 2020 election was stolen. If the probes dont turn up anything, they will only serve to increase confidence in elections, proponents say.

But experts see something much more dangerous happening. Continuing to review elections, especially after a result has been finalized, will allow conspiracy theories to fester and undercut the authority of legitimately elected officials, they say. Once election results are certified by state officials, they have long been considered final and it is unprecedented to continue to probe results months after an official is sworn in. Its an issue that gets at the heart of Americas electoral system if Americans no longer have faith their officials are legitimately elected, they worry, the country is heading down an extremely dangerous path.

It is either a witting or unwitting effort to handcuff democratic self-governance, said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

The efforts also come at the same moment that Republican legislatures around the country are pushing new restrictions to restrict voting access. Unable to point to evidence of significant fraud, Republican lawmakers have frequently said that new restrictions are needed to restore confidence in elections.

In New Hampshire, activists have tried to co-opt an audit in the 15,000 person town of Windham to try and resolve a legitimate discrepancy in vote totals for a state representative race. They unsuccessfully tried to pressure officials there to drop experienced auditors in favor of Jovan Pulitzer, a conspiracy theorist reportedly involved in the Arizona recount who has become a kind of celebrity among those who believe the election was stolen. Even though the experienced auditors have found no evidence of wrongdoing, activists have continued to float baseless theories of wrongdoing in a Telegram channel following audits.

Nothing today is showing evidence of fraud. Nothing today is showing evidence of digital manipulation of the machines, Harri Hursti, an election expert and one of the auditors, said this week, according to WMUR. Its amazing how much disinformation and dishonest reporting has been spreading.

Activists are also pressuring officials in Cheboygan county, Michigan to let an attorney affiliated with Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who brought baseless lawsuits after the election, conduct an audit of election equipment. The chair of the board of commissioners told the Detroit News he could not recall a more contentious issue debated before the board in more than two decades.

The Michigan efforts prompted a letter from the states top election official, who warned the clerks in Cheboygan and Antrim county another hotbed of conspiracy theories that boards didnt have authority to order audits and not to turn over election equipment to unaccredited outside firms, the Washington Post reported. Michigan conducted more than 250 audits after the 2020 race that affirmed the results.

Dominion voting systems, which sold equipment to the state, also warned that counties may not be able to use machines in future elections if they turned them over to uncertified auditors.

We have every reason to want transparency, Jocelyn Benson, the states top election official, said in an interview. But thats not what this is. This is about an effort, as has been proved time and time again by the actions of these individuals, in Arizona and elsewhere, this is an effort to actually spread falsehoods and misinformation under the guise of transparency.

San Luis Obispo county in the central coast of California has been another target for calls for an audit. During a meeting earlier this month, officials played hours of recorded messages calling for an audit, including one asking whether Tommy Gong, the countys clerk and recorder, was a member of the communist party.

Activists are also targeting Fulton county, Georgia, another place that was at the center of Trumps baseless election attacks last year. Earlier in May, a local judge said that an group led by Garland Favorito, who has reportedly pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the JFK assassination, could inspect absentee ballots, though in a key break from the Arizona review, the judge made it clear that the actual ballots would have to remain in county officials custody. Georgia has already manually recounted all of the ballots in the state, which confirmed Joe Bidens win over Trump last year.

Even in Arizona, the crown jewel of the audit movement, activists may have plans to do even more auditing after the current review of 2.1m ballots wraps up. Republicans are finalizing a plan to use untested software to analyze images of ballots, the Arizona Republic reported Friday.

Rarely do the losers believe the they have lost, but historically those who fell short graciously concede once all legal channels are exhausted, said Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa county who now serves as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund.

The proliferation of these actions undermine and erode the very foundation of election integrity and our adversaries need only sit back and watch as we chip away at our democratic norms. We should be telling the American voter the truth the election had integrity, real audits and recounts were done, court challenges heard.

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Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to handcuff democracy - The Guardian

Pro-democracy protesters take part in a Thanksgiving Day rally at Edinburgh Place on Nov. 28, 2019 in Hong Kong. Chris McGrath/Getty Images hide caption

Pro-democracy protesters take part in a Thanksgiving Day rally at Edinburgh Place on Nov. 28, 2019 in Hong Kong.

All over the world, democratic institutions are under threat. The United States isn't just part of that trend it may also be one of the causes. Former Obama administration foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes examines why in a new book called After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made.

In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Brent Baughman, Brianna Scott, Noah Caldwell and Lee Hale. It was edited by Sami Yenigun with help from Wynne Davis. Our executive producer is Cara Tallo.

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Threats To Democracy Are Growing Around the World And The U.S. May Be One Of Them : Consider This from NPR - NPR

To the Editor:

Re G.O.P. Voting Bills Ratchet Up the Penalties on Poll Workers (front page, May 16):

If Republicans would only support policies that a huge majority of people actually want fair elections, living wages, affordable quality health care and child care, taxation of the very wealthy, to name but a few they would no longer need to gerrymander voting districts or pass restrictive voting bills to prevent majority rule.

Joe Biden garnered seven million more votes than his opponent, and the Republicans in Congress represent far fewer Americans than do the Democrats. Can we get rid of the filibuster and get our democracy back, please?

Beatrice ShushanCarlsbad, Calif.

To the Editor:

The G.O.P. is splitting apart over Donald Trump, while hemorrhaging young voters and suburban women. The Republicans fight culture wars and advocate few policy positions. They throw their truth tellers overboard, making the party smaller and smaller still. Their big tent is becoming a pup tent.

The former president never reached 50 percent approval in four years in office. He lost the popular vote twice. He incited an insurrection against the government. His big lie has no chance of prevailing over time against the truth.

This iteration of the Republican Party isnt sustainable. It cant win the presidency with Mr. Trump, and cant win without him. So what do Republicans do? Suppress the vote, cause people to lose trust in our elections and institutions, refuse to accept electoral decisions by the courts, and use their state majorities to advance partisan control of elections.

All this is groundwork to take power and assert minority authoritarian rule. Democracy is truly in crisis.

David PedersonMinnetrista, Minn.

To the Editor:

Liz Cheney and Jeb Bush should team up to form a third party. What beautiful and perfect irony that relatives of the leaders of the George W. Bush administration join to save our democracy.

A platform of moral authority and fiscal conservatism would attract not only the multitudes of disaffected former Trump supporters, but also many Democrats who are uncomfortable with the partys progressive direction.

If nothing else, a new third party would help accomplish what Ms. Cheney urged to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.

To the Editor:

Re The Wrong Way to Distribute Vaccines, by Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Govind Persad (Opinion guest essay, May 25):

The suggestion that it is unethical to allocate vaccines equitably across all nations when some countries are faring worse against the ravages of Covid-19 than others misses one crucial fact: Vaccines are at their most effective when preventing surges of the virus, not combating them once they have taken hold.

When outbreaks occur, the critical tools available to governments are of the nonpharmaceutical variety, such as lockdowns, distancing and mask wearing. Vaccines are also a part of the solution, but with up to three months needed for a two-dose Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccination, followed by a two-week wait in order to achieve full protection, they are not an acute intervention even if there are enough to go around.

We dont know where the next surge will hit or when the next variant will emerge, which is why Covaxs goal to protect the most vulnerable everywhere is, at this stage of the pandemic, the right thing to do. This not only means maximizing the chances of survival for the health workers, elderly and vulnerable whose lives are most at risk, but also minimizing the chances that new, more dangerous variants will come along.

The real issue with vaccines today is not how to divvy up a small slice of the pie for less wealthy nations but how to make their slice bigger, which is why governments and manufacturers of vaccines must do everything in their power to get as many doses as possible to Covax now.

Seth BerkleySoumya SwaminathanRichard HatchettDr. Berkley is chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Dr. Swaminathan is chief scientist of the World Health Organization. Dr. Hatchett is chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Their organizations co-lead Covax.

To the Editor:

Re A Push in Texas to Polish Stains of Race History (front page, May 21):

Its understandable that Texan educators and politicians would err, as have most nations throughout history, on the side of covering up our atrocities. Perhaps the larger educational moment involves asking, Why is there such a push to obscure now?

It appears the social upheaval of our historical moment is producing pressing and unsettling questions. For example, how do we explain to our children that the land upon which we founded our nation was stolen through the Doctrine of Discovery, which entitled colonial powers to claim ownership of Indigenous lands.

How do we teach our kids that the men who crafted our founding documents owned Black people? What are we to make of the Declaration of Independence phrase all men when considering equality?

If we were to see through our delusion of moral superiority, our approach to history would have to deepen and become more nuanced and honest. No wonder many Americans prefer to simply remember the Alamo.

(Rev.) Tom MartinezChandler, Ariz.

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Opinion | Democracy Is Truly in Crisis - The New York Times

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi completes his seventh year in office, Indias perceived democratic backsliding has invariably formed the underlying context of political assessments of his tenure. The governments handling of Covid-19s second wave has added to anxieties related to the suppression of democratic norms.

These concerns were validated by a host of annual democracy rankings earlier this year, which downgraded Indias status to a flawed democracy or electoral autocracy. Irrespective of ones view on the conclusions, these reports have thrown up a set of larger questions over methods to assess democratic robustness, the internal and external variables that shape democratic health, and the roots of the crisis of liberal democracy.

Is Indias democratic backsliding an outlier or part of a historical pattern? In the early 1990s, political scientist Samuel Huntington described the pattern of global democratisation as a series of three waves and reverse waves. The first long wave lasted for almost a century until the end of World War I; the second short wave was in the aftermath of World War II; and the third medium wave began in the late 1970s, lasting till the dawn of the new century.

Since then, the world has been under the grip of a democratic recession. The rising concern among scholars and commentators on how democracies die to borrow the title of a book on this trend is neither surprising nor unwarranted.

Also Read | Pakistans balancing act between the US and the Taliban will affect India

At the outset, the sharp disagreement over democracy ratings, as witnessed in India, is inevitable, since democracy itself, in academic literature, is an essentially contested concept. There are endless debates among scholars on how best to measure democracy. In fact, dissatisfaction among academics with Freedom House and Polity scores led to the establishment of V-Dem that employs more comprehensive indicators and statistically robust techniques. Much like any complex social phenomenon, a snapshot picture of democracy (in terms of headline numbers) will have inherent limitations of subjectivity.

As each of these reports privileges some components of the definition of democracy and relies heavily on expert-based judgments, they capture certain parts of reality and filter some parts out.

This lack of a singular framework of measurement of democracy does not, however, mean that we must not take them seriously. Notwithstanding political rhetoric, these institutes follow a very methodologically rigorous protocol on how to define democracy, best practices to measure the concept, and aggregation of various components into single indices. Further, all these reports share a very high degree of correlation and their datasets (along with methodological details) are publicly available. Their data is regularly employed in the statistical analysis of economic, political, and social policy.

At the heart of criticism are the ideological biases of the experts. We cant be sure about the ideological preferences of these experts as the institutes refrain from sharing the identity of individual country experts, for understandable reasons. Even as these reports document rising populism, they are subject to the same populism-driven distrust of experts. These institutes must therefore assuage these rising concerns by greater transparency.

But we must recognise that there is a certain consensus democracy in every region of the world is under attack by populist leaders and their supporters who are exploiting nationalistic appeals to concentrate power. As a result, dissenting voices (including all sorts of minorities) are facing the heat of this anti-pluralist backlash.

The big decline in Indias ratings hinges on a decline in civil liberties and deterioration in political tolerance. And not surprisingly, the actions and inactions of the Modi government have been highlighted as the driving factor in Indias democratic backsliding.

While India must focus on the home front to regain its political legitimacy, global trends cannot be discounted in this decade of democratic recession. For example, in the previous two reversal waves, shocks to geopolitical order (such as wars), new States with weak institutions (which could not keep up with increasing pressures on the system), and neighbourhood effects were important drivers.

We must also not discount the shifting geopolitical order with the rise of China and increasing economic inequalities across the globe in understanding democratic recession. States in the developing world are unable to keep up with governance demands in face of an economic slowdown. And, most countries are facing renewed challenges with new types of non-State actors (including Big Tech) trying to influence domestic politics.

In many parts, where the rate of backsliding has been steep, especially in consolidated democracies such as India, there is also a simultaneous collapse of the ancien regimes under the weight of their inefficiencies. The liberal model of democracy is struggling as its promise of fostering equality and giving a voice to all citizens in politics has remained, to a great extent, unfulfilled. As BR Ambedkar warned, political democracy can only be sustained with the foundation of social and economic democracy.

The global surge of nationalist-populist leaders did not happen in a vacuum. Nor can their continued popularity be easily wished away. Many of these leaders have cemented a solid support base, and the political opposition in many of these countries still remains largely discredited. While these leaders remake politics in their country that is more amenable to their ideological worldview, the line between disagreements and dissent will continue to remain thin. This means that the expansive notions of democracy that were envisioned during the rapid march of global democratisation of the 1980s and 90s will continue to remain under stress in the near future.

This is not to say that the supporters of democracy must learn to live with truncated notions for the foreseeable future. It is to suggest that they must participate in a more clear-eyed appraisal of the backsliding and chart out the path of recovery. Democracy is strengthened through dialogue on divergent issues. On the home front, this would require both resolve to engage with the current churning, and more inclusive intention to re-envision the idea of India.

Rahul Verma is a fellow, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi

The views expressed are personal

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Assessing the quality of Indian democracy - Hindustan Times

With changes to voting and campaign finance rules, Maryland sets the pace for nation

BALTIMORE Several voting and campaign finance reform bills that the Maryland General Assembly passed this session became law in Maryland after Gov. Larry Hogan chose not to sign them. The new laws increase access to early voting, improve on the state's vote-by-mail system, and reduce the role of large and corporate donors in races for governor. While none of the bills got Gov. Hogans endorsement, many of the bills earned bipartisan support in the state legislature.

We are disappointed that Gov. Hogan did not sign these common sense reforms, especially the update to the Fair Elections Act, which he used to win office, Said Maryland PIRG Director Emily Scarr, With these new laws Maryland has firmly positioned itself as a leader on democracy reforms."

The events of 2020 made a clear case for why American democracy desperately needs reform. Butwhile an important federal election reform bill called the For The People Act has stalled in the U.S. Senate, a handful of states, notably Maryland, are pushing forward with building a better democracy.

The Maryland bills passed recently include:

States have often been described as laboratories of democracy and, in recent years, Maryland has been one of the most productive laboratories. In fact, many of the reforms in the stalled federal For the People Act are already in use in Maryland. Over the last decade, Maryland has passed automatic voter registration, has expanded access to mail-in balloting and, after the state legislature passed enabling legislation in 2013,five Maryland cities and counties established successful public campaign financing programs to empower small donors.

Groups including Maryland PIRG, Common Cause Maryland, the League of Women Voters of Maryland, the Maryland State Conference of the NAACP, Disability Rights Maryland, and the Maryland ACLU have worked with legislators and activists to advocate for these reforms.

So, while partisan gridlock stymies reform just across the state line in Washington, DC, Maryland is showing that there is a path forward for building a democracy that works for everyone.

Our democracy works best when we all participate and everyones voice is heard, in Maryland, the 49 other states and DC, said Scarr. Instituting these electoral reforms is a powerful way to ensure we have a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

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Maryland democracy reforms go into effect without signature from Gov. Hogan - State PIRGs