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It is easy to dismiss a Green politician campaigning for a fair voting system as self-interested, but this is not about my job, my party having a fair share of power, or even the gross injustice of my vote in parliamentary elections having been trodden into the dirt in every election over the past 40 years. It is about claiming the right to live in a democracy: that is a duty not just for me but for every British citizen.

The impact on the Green Party of first-past-the-post (a horse-race, not a democratic ballot) is made clear in the Electoral Reform Societys analysis of the 2019 general election Voters Left Voiceless, showing that a full 98.5% of Green votes were ignored, i.e. had no impact on the final outcome and 96.2% of Green votes were unrepresented, i.e. were cast for candidates who were not elected. It takes more votes to elect a Green than to elect a politician from any of the parties in the Westminster Parliament. According to analysis by the House of Commons Library, In 2019 the Conservatives got one seat for every 38,264 votes, while Labour got one seat for every 50,837 votes. It took many more votes to elect a Lib Dem (336,038) and Green MP (866,435), but far fewer to elect an SNP MP (25,883).

First-past-the-post elections are what a game theorist would call repeated games: as somebody who supports a party that is neither Tweedledum nor Tweedledee you get the opportunity to be beaten up repeatedly. We can all recall the feeling that comes when a general election is announced: first the excitement unavoidable for a political hack, and then the sense of doom at what the two-party squeeze will do to you and your voters. The outrage of tactical voting voting against your interests and your better judgement because the electoral system forces you to is a torture unique to majoritarian systems like ours. It is a torture that should be put back in the middle ages where it belongs. As 21st-century British citizens we should have the right to make a free choice at elections what else can democracy mean if not that?

This bruising experience also explains why Greens have been at the forefront of building cross-party cooperation. In 2017 we made the case for a Progressive Alliance, an electoral kamikaze strategy that gave our loyal voters an excuse to abandon us when the two-party squeeze came on. In 2019, we were part of the pro-Brexit Unite to Remain process, with the Liberal Democrats standing aside for us in 10 seats, including my own in Stroud. As a proof of concept for cross-party cooperation this was powerful, but without Labour we didnt have sufficient power to shift any seats.

So why do Labour repeatedly refuse such cooperation even when, as the data above show, their votes are also under-represented by an electoral system that works primarily for the Tories? During the fevered election campaign in Stroud I was amazed to hear a Labour councillor I had worked with closely saying that our cooperation on the local council would be blown apart unless I stood down, depriving the thousands of Green voters in Stroud of the right to make a free choice. At the time I dismissed this as absurd hyperbole but I now see it as an insight into Labour party thinking.

Many Labour MPs will say that they support proportional representation, but their party policy is still to support the first-past-the-post system, a position that Yanis Varoufakis has called contemptible. But it is not irrational. Labour are consciously choosing to allow these dangerous Conservatives to hold power because they fear loss of the power granted to them by the two-party system. No doubt their private polling confirms what analysis by ERS for the Green Party makes clear: 8% of Labours voters in 2019 would have voted Green under a fair electoral system.

The Electoral Reform Society ran an interesting statistical analysis projecting seats if people had expressed their preference under an Additional Member System (Like the Scottish parliament). It suggested that the Green Party would have achieved 38 parliamentary seats and that AMS would have knocked the Tories back to 284 seats, depriving them of an overall majority and making a coalition government essential. I would choose such a Parliament and a non-Tory coalition government; but Labour would rather let the Tories into power than share power.

Because in my South West home citizens choose to exercise their right to vote for a range of parties, more votes are thrown away by our anti-democratic system here than anywhere else. The Electoral Reform Society used a metric to demonstrate this called the DV score showing the extent to which an election result deviates from proportionality, i.e. from what it would look like if seats were proportional to votes gained by each party. In England, this DV score is highest in the South West at 34.6 compared with 17.5 for England as a whole, indicating that a third of the seats in our region were unearned, and unearned by Tories who ruthlessly exploited the first-past-the post system to hold 48 of the 55 seats in our region on barely more than half the vote. Ironically, given that Labour continue to refuse to support proportional representation in spite of increasing pressure, it is Labour voters who are more disenfranchised than voters for any other party.

The partys review of the 2019 election was honest about the scale of the task ahead of Labour in winning in 2024: they will need to make 82 net gains for even the slimmest of parliamentary majorities, with a rise in Labour support as large as that seen in 1997. The sad thing is that Labour still believe they must go it alone, set on taking this risk against massive odds rather than cooperating with others. We simply cannot risk the damage this will do to our country and must all mobilise for a united front in the next general election. This could be based around a shared platform of constitutional reform and a pre-election arrangement so that only one candidate supporting these vital reforms was opposing the Tory in each constituency.

Of course, when we talk about electoral reform we are just at the tip of the iceberg of the fundamental transformation that our political system is crying out for. The absurd mash-up of toffs and cronies in the House of Lords is even more anachronistic, even more anti-democratic. And the absence of a written constitution means that authoritarian politicians like Johnson can try it on with ruses like proroguing Parliament, hoping the apathy or weariness of the people will allowing the outrage to pass. I would also support much wider use of citizens assemblies as an addition to, not a substitute for, representative democracy, as they were used in the Irish abortion referendum. The exact content of the joint platform for constitutional transform is open to debate. The urgent necessity of agreeing it is transparently clear.

In their book How Democracies Die, US political scientists Levitsky and Ziblatt give examples of how, in various different societies, democracy was saved by politicians who were committed to it putting their differences aside and working together in the interests of the democratic system itself. In the UK our task is somewhat different: we need democrats to come together to build democracy for the first time in the UK. As Gandhi said when asked what he thought of British civilization: I think it would be a good idea.

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Progressives must rally together to demand democracy - Open Democracy

The political and ideological project being implemented by Polands populist governing party, Law and Justice (PiS), has a long way to run. The re-election of the partys candidate Andrzej Duda to the presidency last month has merely ushered in a new chapter and it will be even more demanding for liberals than what went before.

International attention may be focused on Belarus, but in Poland, ministers have just announced an autumn agenda which involves a simultaneous attack on the judiciary and the independent media. It coincides with intensifying pressure on the LGBT+ community in the form of verbal assaults from PiS figures. Demonstrations in cities across the country against the pre-trial jailing of an LGBT+ activist have led not to dialogue, but to the heavy-handed arrests of dozens more.

Yet Duda, who stood on an anti-LGBT+ platform, ended his campaign with a puzzlingly emollient statement. If anyone felt offended by my action or words during these [last] five years, not only in the campaign, he said, please accept my apologies.

His side ran a brutal campaign. Not a single impartial report about an opposition candidate was carried by the main state television news programme in the run-up to the vote. Dudas main opponent, Rafa Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, was routinely dehumanised and lied about.

So why was Duda apologising? Some observers assumed that he wanted to signal a genuine change, a wish to heal the polarisation in Polish society. In our view, Dudas words carried less the spirit of Gandhi than Oscar Wilde, whose advice was to always forgive ones enemies, because nothing annoys them so much.

Dudas speech was another scene in a long-running piece of theatre that has played out since 2015, orchestrated by Jarosaw Kaczyski who leads PiS. Since this spectacle began, the Polish media have poured out endless streams of vitriol about the judiciary or minorities including refugees and the LGBT community. In requesting forgiveness, Duda was signalling that not everything said before the vote should be treated seriously.

But his statement itself should be taken seriously. It is a sign of our political times. Moreover, this is where Poland usefully illustrates a broader global phenomenon that we could call populistainment.

The phenomenon applies as much to Donald Trump, Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoan or Thierry Baudet, the leader of the populist Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands. Essentially, it means that the media becomes a theatre for an ongoing performance aimed at capturing and keeping the audiences attention.

Of course, entertainment is nothing new in politics. The citizens of Rome were distracted by bread and circuses. In the 1990s, prominent politicians started to literally perform (Bill Clinton playing the saxophone), disco dance (Aleksander Kwaniewski), or simply import showbusiness into politics via television (Silvio Berlusconi). Some academics used the term politainment to characterise that era.

Populistainment is a new stage in this process. If democratic politicians in the past used entertainment to warm up their image and appear more human to better to sell their ideas, populistainment turns that on its head. In the populist playbook, entertainment eclipses ideology and such traditional political activity as building party structures. Social media turbocharges the trend and takes it on to another level.

It should be stressed that this new form of political entertainment does not necessarily mean amusing the audience. The comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Ukraine showed that entertainers do sometimes win elections. But populistainment can also involve arousing fear, outrage and contempt.

The PiS strategy in Poland is a classic example. Whether raising alarm by claiming that the opposition will remove child support or by scapegoating LGBT people, Germans or Jews, the PiS has since 2015 ensured it commands public attention at all times. The party strategy is twofold: first leap forward by attacking someone, then leap back and a call for responsibility and community. Duda recently did exactly this: after attacking LGBT people, he called for tolerance just days later.

The most fundamental consequence of populistainment is the marginalisation of truth in the public discourse.

Research by a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology on true and false news disseminated via Twitter proves that false rumours affect not only elections, but economic and investment decisions. On an unprecedented scale, politicians are competing for public attention. Populistainment is changing not only our politics, but our world in general.

This is not just a question of political style. Populists like Kaczyski, Hungarys Viktor Orbn, and Trump also have a political agenda. They want to subordinate state institutions and the media to their parties or a small circle of power. In Poland, populistainment is used as a veil for the overhaul of the judiciary, just as the PiS version of democracy is used as a veil for authoritarian behaviour. Populists know from neuroscience that serving up dopamine is one of the best ways to keep our easily bored brains hooked. They deliberately turn public debate into a chaos of inflamed emotions, defensive reactions and rumours.

And he populists strategic use of entertainment to win poses a fundamental challenge to defenders of liberal democracy. Calling populists fascists and authoritarians stopped making an impression on voters long ago. However justified, it became repetitive, uninteresting and therefore, unfortunately, ineffective. If liberal democrats dont learn about the power of spectacle in the era of dopamine politics, they will fade into irrelevance. And if populism is about creating a spectacle that depicts liberal democracy falling apart, liberalism must provide an alternative spectacle.

Issues-based campaigns, focused on positive ideas for the future are an option. Trzaskowski tried this in the Polish presidential race, with his New Solidarity slogan, an idea meant to be unifying and hopeful. After his defeat, Trzaskowski announced plans to build a social movement. Whether or not he succeeds depends on whether he will be able to provide a robust and inspiring alternative to the reactionary PiS vision for Poland.

Another solution is to have the courage to speak about the things that cause public discontent, fear and frustration. Populists are not afraid to speak about peoples emotions and often win because of it. Liberals should not try to manipulate emotions, but rather work with them. Fear can be translated into courage, loss into hope, and anxiety into creativity.

Unless the PiSs opponents can provide their own winning vision along with a healthy dose of entertainment, they risk losing the chance to shape Polands future for at least the next decade. Globally, liberals risk the same fate.

Jarosaw Kuisz is a historian, editor-in-chief of the Polish weekly Kultura Liberalna and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin

Karolina Wigura is a historian, political editor of the Polish weekly Kultural Liberalna and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin

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In Poland we've become spectators at the dismantling of democracy - The Guardian

Trailing badly in the polls, overtaken by the worst health crisis in 100 years and deprived of the cruising economy he had hoped to ride to a second term, President Donald Trump is actively trying to discredit an election that could see him turned out of office -- or is at least preparing the groundwork for a bitter legal battle that could drag on for weeks in the event of a close result.

"If it's not going to be an honest and fair election, people really need to think long and hard about it," Trump said Thursday in some of the most foreboding and loaded comments ever uttered by a leader of the world's most powerful democracy.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden summed up all of these Trump attacks when he said, reacting to earlier comments in which the President had trashed postal balloting: "Pure Trump. He doesn't want an election."

It makes discomforting, but perfect, sense that a President who was impeached for abusing his power by trying to coerce a foreign nation, Ukraine, into interfering in the election to damage his opponent would do anything within -- and beyond -- his legitimate powers to save his skin in an election. Confident of impunity, Trump is now behaving in exactly the power-grabbing manner that was predicted when he was acquitted in his Senate trial.

Even before he was President, Trump and his campaign expected to benefit in 2016 from a Russian election interference scheme -- which he publicly encouraged by asking Moscow's hackers to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails, according to former special counsel Robert Mueller.

American democracy at stake

Trump's full-bore effort to convince Americans that an election he may lose is corrupt is far more sinister than simply preparing a potentially face-saving exit from the White House.

The President's voters and his conservative media enablers have shown that when it is coming from him, they are not too concerned about assaults on America's constitutional norms and the institutions that hold presidents to account. That means Trump's anti-democratic tendencies will not necessarily rebound against him with constituencies that voted for a strongman four years ago.

But Trump's wild lies about election fraud are another example of how he prioritizes his personal advantage ahead of national interests and the health of the political system. Guaranteeing elections -- the bedrock of a free society -- and the institutions that support them is a fundamental duty of any president, bound up in the oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The same goes for ensuring a peaceful transition of power -- even if he loses, however personally sickening to Trump that may be.

Freedom erodes quickly when leaders with unaccountable power begin to discredit the mechanics of free and fair elections. While his US political rivals are far from having to worry about knocks on the door in the middle of the night, Trump is adopting the rhetoric of the autocrats he idolizes. Already, the period before and after the November 3 election is looking like one of the most perilous in recent US history.

If he loses the election but claims it was rigged, Trump will delegitimize the result among millions of voters who backed him but might accept a loss if he graciously conceded, as is expected of every beaten presidential candidate who puts nation above self.

The appearance of a tainted election would certainly shatter hopes that a Biden administration might harbor of uniting a deeply divided nation and of summoning national resolve to finally prevail over a pandemic that Trump mismanaged and ignored.

It would also sow distrust of elections on the right, potentially for decades, further fueling conspiratorial fringe groups like QAnon. A sense that Trump was trying to destroy a legitimate Democratic presidency would also exacerbate liberal fury, pouring gasoline on the current national political inferno.

A disputed election in 2020 would be far more corrosive to democracy even than the bitterly fought aftermath of the George W. Bush vs. Al Gore duel that was eventually decided by the Supreme Court in 2000. On that occasion, despite the resentment and huge stakes, it could be fairly argued that both candidates were democrats committed to the preservation of the US political system. That is a hard case to make 20 years later.

The President's constant trashing of the US electoral system also has another menacing side effect: It throws open the door to the Russian election interference that Trump has refused to admit happened on his behalf in 2016 and that US intelligence agencies assess is happening again, with other US foes like China and Iran also mulling their own preferences for the next president. The influence and disinformation aspects of Moscow's meddling operation in 2016 aimed to exploit and widen angry divides that already existed in American politics. The more the President creates discord and distrust in the electoral system, the easier that job becomes.

Senior intelligence and law enforcement officials are not worried that the President's incessant warnings that foreign powers could flood the country with fake ballots are realistic. But they do fear that his rhetoric could provide fertile ground for their propagandists and misinformation farms, CNN reported last month.

"They can't physically do anything about (mail-in ballots) but (they can) create social media narratives to create levels of doubt and play into the debate," a law enforcement official said. "We are alert for the fact they may take doubts about mail-in ballots and exploit that online," the official said.

Trump is frustrated conspiracies about 2016 are not prompting action

Trump's aides and defenders have often suggested that critics who worry whether he will peacefully leave power or who fear he is trying to interfere in the election are paranoid and have a political agenda.

But the President -- in one of the periodic lightning bolts of damning truth (like when he told NBC he had fired former FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation) -- exposed the extent of his own malfeasance in an interview with Fox Business News on Thursday.

"They want $25 billion, billion, for the post office. Now they need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots," Trump said on Fox Business, repeating his false claims that mail-in voting would be "fraudulent."

"But if they don't get those two items, that means you can't have universal mail-in voting because you -- they're not equipped to have it," Trump added.

There was another sign on Thursday that the President was getting antsy about the failure so far of the Justice Department to move against former Obama administration officials linked to the Russia investigation.

Prodded by friendly questions from Fox's Maria Bartiromo, Trump lashed out at Wray -- whom he appointed -- and even seemed to cast doubt on the ultimate loyalty of Barr, who has repeatedly intervened in cases and controversies to Trump's political benefit. The President appeared to be agitating for both men to effectively intervene in the election by producing evidence hurtful to his opponent.

"So Christopher Wray was put there. We have an election coming up. I wish he was more forthcoming. He certainly hasn't been," the President said.

"There are documents that they want to get, and we have said we want to get. We're going to find out if he's going to give those documents. But certainly he's been very, very protective."

Trump said Wray should provide more documents to prosecutor John Durham, who was tapped by Barr to lead the review into the origins of the Russia investigation in yet another exercise apparently designed to gut highly critical findings by Mueller about the President's conduct.

More suspicion of the White House's behind-the-scenes activity surfaced last week, when it emerged that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with rapper Kanye West, who has announced a run for president that has no chance of winning electoral votes but that some critics have surmised could attract sufficient votes among young Black voters in states decided by razor-thin margins to drive down Biden's share of the vote.

That's an answer that is unlikely to put concerns about the White House's pre-election activity to rest.

Adam Levine, Manu Raju and Jeremy Diamond contributed to this report.

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Trump's election meddling is threatening US democracy - CNN

How activists and citizen journalists can revive the American promise.

| 5:04 PM

It is no secret that American democracy is teetering on the edge of destruction. A white nationalist authoritarian movement currently headed by Donald Trump wants to destroy majoritarian popular consent before a minority of racist whites, prudish evangelicals and overcompensating, insecure men lose their grip on both the culture and the government. Meanwhile, hyperpartisan division is making the notoriously clunky, procedurally challenging and risk-averse American system of government impossible to navigate for anyone trying to change the status quo.

But there is a silver lining to our precarious danger: we are also witnessing an increase in citizen activism, both political and social, unseen in generations. When a police officer murdered George Floyd on that fateful day in May, it reignited a public protest movement still coursing through the nation. Thousands of normally apolitical Americans have joined local clubs, citizen groups and even filed to run for public office.

There is an awareness among many Americans that if the institutions cannot save us, we must play a direct part in saving ourselves. Recording and communications technologies are helping greatly in the effort. The ability to capture police brutality and open racism on video has changed the conversation and awakened the majority of Americans to how often the officially sanitized police record of events differs from the awful reality. Ordinary citizens now have the power to hold both individual and state-sanctioned oppressors accountable in public spaces.

This phenomenon applies to Donald Trump and the federal government as much as to local police officers and bigots. Consider for a moment the recent hullabaloo over Trumps attempts to sabotage the Postal Service. While Democratic leadership in Congress can and should use every tool at their disposal over the issue, there is realistically only so much they can do. The Administration can ignore every subpoena as long as Senate Republicans allow them to get away with it, and precipitating a Constitutional crisis by sending the Capitol police to arrest the Postmaster General could easily add to the destabilizing chaos in which Trump thrives.

The greatest power to stop Trump comes from all of us as direct activists and citizen journalists. Much of what the rightwing authoritarian movement wants to inflict on the country, depends only on quiet acquiescence from the rest of us.

For instance, it was normal people taking pictures of postal boxes being removed from city streets that caused the USPS to backtrack and halt the practice until after election day. And postal workers themselves can put up fierce resistance to any attempts to sabotage ballot delivery. On top of the National Letter Carriers Association directly endorsing Trumps opponent Joe Biden, there are already reports that postal workers plan to deliver ballots on time come rain, sleet, snowor Trump and DeJoy:

Whatever DeJoys actual motive may or may not be, true letter carriers were disturbed by the sight of mail going undelivered. Its frustrating for us, Julion said. Because we know this is not what we do. In an organization of people sworn to get the mail delivered no matter what, DeJoy became known as Delay.

What will likely have a bigger impact on the election is the avowed determination of the 300,000 letter carriers themselves to deliver the ballots this year no matter what DeJoy and his boss Trump do.

Even more so than priority mail, Julion said.Im confident, you get those ballots in our hands, were going to deliver them. If nothing else gets delivered, those ballots will.

He added, Theres a message we want to deliver, too.

The message is that nobody is going to steal this election if they can help it, that falsehoods and sabotage are not going to stop letter carriers from doing their sworn duty and thereby enabling people to exercise their right to vote even in a pandemic.

This is what we do, Julion repeated, adding, We can handle it.

This is what will be required until at least January 20, 2021: an army of regular citizens stepping up to document wrongdoing and use whatever power they have in their work and social life to halt the destruction of democracy and move forward the cause of justice. If Trump and the Republican National Committee send a combination of private and DHS goons to intimidate voters in minority communities, it will be up to citizens to take video and use social media to organize communities to force them to back down. If they try to send squads to prevent the counting of mail-in ballots in a second Brooks Brothers Riot, it will be up to all of us to protect the vote counters by documenting it and standing in their way with overwhelming numbers. It will be crucial for young and healthy Americans not directly assisting anti-totalitarian campaigns to volunteer as poll workers to ensure that in-person voting will not be affected despite the pandemic. And so on.

The next few months will be a crucible not only for American democracy, but the health and safety of the international community and planet. Democratic leaders can do more, but theres still only so much that they can do until Trump is gone because of the flaws inherent in the system. But if we all do our parts and put all hands on deck, we can get through this together.

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Saving Democracy Is Up To All of Us - Washington Monthly

As we try to face the future, we are usually fighting the last war, not the one thats coming next. One of the most striking points the political philosopher David Runciman made in his seminal book How Democracy Ends was that democracies dont fail backwards: they fail forward. Thats why those who see in the current difficulties of liberal democracies the stirrings of past monsters Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, to name just three are always looking in the wrong place. And if thats true, the key question for us at this moment in history is: how might our current system fail? What will bring it down?

The answer, it turns out, has been hiding in plain sight for years. It has three components. The first is the massive concentration of corporate power and private wealth thats been under way since the 1970s, together with a corresponding increase in inequality, social exclusion and polarisation in most western societies; the second is the astonishing penetration of dark money into democratic politics; and the third is the revolutionary transformation of the information ecosystem in which democratic politics is conducted a transformation that has rendered the laws that supposedly regulated elections entirely irrelevant to modern conditions.

These threats to democracy have long been visible to anyone disposed to look for them. For example, Lawrence Lessigs Republic, Lost and Jane Mayers Dark Money explained how a clique of billionaires has shaped and perverted American politics. And in the UK, Martin Moores landmark study Democracy Hacked showed how, in the space of just one election cycle, authoritarian governments, wealthy elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes and turn social networks into battlefields.

All of this is by way of sketching the background to Peter Geoghegans fine book. Its a compulsively readable, carefully researched account of how a malignant combination of rightwing ideology, secretive money (much of it from the US) and weaponisation of social media have shaped contemporary British (and to a limited extent, European) politics. And it has been able to do this in what has turned out to be a regulatory vacuum with laws, penalties and overseeing authorities that are no longer fit for purpose.

His account is structured both chronologically and thematically. He starts with the Brexit referendum and the various kinds of unsavoury practices that took place during that doomed plebiscite from the various illegalities of Vote Leave, through Arron Bankss lavish expenditure to the astonishing tale of the dark money funnelled through the Ulster DUP and a loophole in Northern Irelands electoral law. One of the most depressing parts of this narrative is the bland indifference of most mainstream UK media to these scandalous events. If it had not been for the openDemocracy website (for which Geoghegan works), much of this would never have seen the light of day.

Geoghegans account of the genesis and growth of the European Research Group is absolutely riveting

The middle section of the book explores how dark money has amplified the growing influence of the American right on British politics. This is a story of ideology and finance of how the long-term Hayekian, neoliberal project has played out on these shores. Its a great case study in how ruling elites can be infected with policy ideas and programmes via those second-hand traders in ideas of whom Hayek spoke so eloquently: academics, thinktanks and media commentators. In that context, Geoghegans account of the genesis and growth of the European Research Group the party within a party that did for Theresa May is absolutely riveting. And again it leaves one wondering why there was so little media exploration of the origins and financing of that particular little cabal.

The final part of the book deals with the transformation of our information ecosystem: the ways in which the automated targeted-advertising machines of social media platforms have been weaponised by rightwing actors to deliver precisely calibrated messages to voters, in ways that are completely opaque to the general public, as well as to regulators.

Remainers will probably read Geoghegans account of this manoeuvring by Brexiters as further evidence that the Brexit vote was invalid. This seems to me implausible or at any rate undecidable. Geoghegan agrees. Pro-Leave campaigns broke the law, he writes, but we cannot say with any certainty that the result would have been different if they had not. Instead, the referendum and its aftermath have revealed something far more fundamental and systemic. Namely, a broken political system that is ripe for exploitation again. And again. And again.

And therein lies the significance of this remarkable book. The integrity and trustworthiness of elections is a fundamental requirement for a functioning democracy. The combination of unaccountable, unreported dark money and its use to create targeted (and contradictory) political messages for individuals and groups means that we have no way of knowing how free and fair our elections have become. Many of the abuses exposed by Geoghegan and other researchers are fixable with new laws and better-resourced regulators. The existential threat to liberal democracy comes from the fact that those who have successfully exploited some inadequacies of the current regulatory system who include Boris Johnson and his current wingman, Cummings have absolutely no incentive to fix the system from which they have benefited. And they wont. Which could be how our particular version of democracy ends.

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Democracy for Sale by Peter Geoghegan review the end of politics as we know it? - The Guardian