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By Mai'a K. Davis Cross By Mai'a K. Davis Cross June 7 at 9:15 AM

Maia K. Davis Cross is the Edward W. Brooke professor of political science at Northeastern University. She is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Politics of Crisis in Europe.

It may seem that the June 8 general election in the United Kingdom puts Britains exit from the European Union on solid democratic ground. In fact, however, this is only the latest stage in a deeply problematic saga that has been anything but democratic.

Beyond the fact that former prime minister David Cameron promised a Brexit vote only as a desperate measure to stay in power in 2015, relying on a popular referendum as the sole determinant of the U.K.s status in the E.U. was a bad course of action.

Political scientists have long acknowledged that referendums are a poor gauge of voters actual preferences. Electorates are especially vulnerable to manipulation when complex issues are reduced into a simple yes or no question. Results often come down to which side has more money and persuasive marketing. This was certainly true in the case of the Brexit vote. The Leave side mischaracterized and even lied about the nature of the E.U. and the U.K.s role in it. And we now know that the same company that used personal data to individualize propaganda and fake news in President Trumps campaign Cambridge Analytica was paid to work for the Leave side.

The undemocratic nature of the process goes even deeper. First, there is no legal precedent in the U.K. system for making major, constitutional decisions in this way. With no single, written constitution, British governance since the 17th century has been based firmly in the supremacy of Parliament. Although Parliament did authorize the 2015 European Union Referendum Act, nothing in either the act or U.K. law stipulated that the referendum would be binding. Despite this, the referendum was used to circumvent Parliament, and it took a lawsuit for the Supreme Court to finally grant members of Parliament the right to vote on invoking Article 50. But by then, it was more than seven months after the fact, and it had become politically impossible for Parliament to vote against the already questionable referendum results.

Second, there was the simple 50 percent threshold. It is hard to imagine any other country in the E.U. using such a low-bar decision for such a high-stakes question. For example, the French Constitution states that France is in the E.U., and the Italian Constitution forbids abolishing international treaties with a popular vote. They would have to actually change their constitutions no easy feat before a vote on membership could even take place, and their constitutional courts would still be able to block it.

Finally, British Prime Minister Theresa May who only inherited her position from Cameron has been on shaky ground in her pursuit of a hard Brexit. The simplistic language of the referendum said nothing about the nature of the withdrawal. May did not even support the Leave campaign before the vote. Now she repeatedly echoes the pro-Brexit United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in speeches even though that far-right party has all but evaporated. Since triggering Article 50, May has continued to sideline Scotland and Northern Ireland, both of which voted to remain. And she is still only willing to pay lip service to Parliament, giving it an up-or-down vote only on the final text of the withdrawal agreement a vote she has vowed to ignore if it doesnt go her way.

Since May was never publicly elected as prime minister, her surprise call for a general election might seem to allow for some kind of democratic mandate. After all, Brexit is the most significant change in the U.K.s global role since the end of its empire. But Mays motives are best explained by the numbers: Data experts thought that she had a better chance to win now than in two years.

And yet, like Camerons gamble on Brexit, the snap election is backfiring. The dramatic loss of support that May has already experienced, especially in the face of a weak opponent, makes her approach even less legitimate. The only way to start reducing Britains democratic deficit would be for her party to lose. A coalition of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, for instance, would bring Parliament back into the process, and this would bode much better for British democracy as Brexit plays out.

The E.U., by contrast, has been remarkably fair in dealing with Brexit all along. From Camerons first announcement, E.U. leaders were willing to work with the British, giving ground on core issues such as immigration and exemption from the principle of an ever closer Union. When that didnt work, the E.U. then made it clear that it would negotiate its side by taking into account both member-state and E.U. citizens preferences and embracing democratic deliberation and transparency in the terms of the withdrawal agreement.

Indeed, the democratic deficit will only deepen when the U.K. actually leaves the E.U. Despite Brexit, the British will always need to work closely with the E.U. But when they no longer have a vote in E.U. governance and cannot even sit at the decision-making table in Brussels, they will truly experience what it feels like to follow rules that they do not make. Brexit may have been envisioned as a means of restoring democracy and sovereignty to the British people, but that is far from what is actually happening.

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Don't be fooled by the UK election: There's nothing democratic about Brexit - Washington Post

Exciting to see so many people filing to run for office. (See Candidates file for November election by Catherine Krummey, Bothell-Kenmore Reporter, May 22)

Our democracy works best when more of us participate. Our representatives and senators need to hear what matters to us. For example, the health care bill that just passed the house is being rewritten in the Senate. Our stories about the importance of health insurance coverage need to be shared with Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. They will use these stories to make sure no one loses their health care.

This is important since the bill that passed in the House would cause millions of Americans to lose their insurance. The changes to the Medicaid program will especially harm children, the elderly and those with disabilities. So pick up the phone or a pen and participate in our democracy by contacting our senators. You can help make a difference for millions of Americans!

Willie Dickerson,

Snohomish

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Democracy works best when more participate - Kirkland Reporter

Freedom House is out with its exhaustive report on democracy and democratic trends around the world. There is very little good news:

The 21st century has been marked by a resurgence of authoritarian rule that has proved resilient despite economic fragility and occasional popular resistance. Modern authoritarianism has succeeded, where previous totalitarian systems failed, due to refined and nuanced strategies of repression, the exploitation of open societies, and the spread of illiberal policies in democratic countries themselves. The leaders of todays authoritarian systems devote full-time attention to the challenge of crippling the opposition without annihilating it, and flouting the rule of law while maintaining a plausible veneer of order, legitimacy, and prosperity.

The trend is disheartening, to say the least. Every indicator of freedom it tracks free expression, pluralism, rule of law, individual rights, etc. has declined worldwide. Freedom House suggests authoritarians have gotten more daring and liberal democracies less liberal (in the sense of 19th century liberalism), which in turn gives encouragement to the authoritarians.

One cannot understand the decline of democracy without examining the out-sized role Russian President Vladimir Putin plays:

This is particularly true in the areas of media control, propaganda, the smothering of civil society, and the weakening of political pluralism. Russia has also moved aggressively against neighboring states where democratic institutions have emerged or where democratic movements have succeeded in ousting corrupt authoritarian leaders. . . .

The success of the Russian and Chinese regimes in bringing to heel and even harnessing the forces produced by globalizationdigital media, civil society, free marketsmay be their most impressive and troubling achievement.

Modern authoritarianism is particularly insidious in its exploitation of open societies. Russia and China have both taken advantage of democracies commitment to freedom of expression and delivered infusions of propaganda and disinformation. Moscow has effectively prevented foreign broadcasting stations from reaching Russian audiences even as it steadily expands the reach of its own mouthpieces, the television channel RT and the news service Sputnik.

Western democracies have been barely skirting disaster. Russia, with varying degrees of success, now routinely interferes with elections in Western democracies, trying to tip elections to local pro-Russian parties. It bankrolls right-wing parties, infiltrates free media and, when needed, deploys force as it did in Ukraine. Russias modus operandi might sound awfully familiar:

For Russia, the payoff from this strategy is a network of parties that identify with the Kremlins hatred of liberal values, support Russia on critical foreign policy issues, and praise Putin as a strong leader. While some of these parties are still marginal forces in domestic politics, a growing number are regarded as legitimate contenders, especially since an uncontrolled influx of refugees and an increase in terrorist attacks dented public trust in mainstream parties. Even if Russia remains unpopular in most European countries, the fact that increasingly influential political figures laud Putin for his energy, decisiveness, and eagerness to challenge liberal orthodoxies is regarded as a gain for Moscow. As these parties acquire a share of governing power in EU states, the prospects for a recognition of the Crimea annexation and the abandonment of economic sanctions improve significantly.

You can see why Russia is so delighted with President Trump.

And finally Western operatives including none other than Paul Manafort have no qualms about helping authoritarians, for a price. Authoritarian states also rent the services of former government officials and members of Congress, powerful lawyers, and experienced political image-makers to persuade skeptical audiences that they share the interests of democracies, the report explains. These lobbyists work to advance the economic goals of their clients energy companies and other businesses, but they also burnish the reputations of regimes that have been sullied by the jailing of dissidents or opposition leaders, the shuttering of media outlets, or violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators. Examples, according to Freedom House, include Manafort, Michael Flynn and Richard Burt: According toPolitico, Burt received $365,000 in the first half of 2016 for lobbying on behalf of Nord Stream II, a Russian-backed pipeline plan that would deliver more natural gas directly to Western and Central Europe via the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine and Belarus. At the same time, Burt was helping to write a major Trump foreign policy address. That speech, among other things, called for greater cooperation with Russia. Remarkable, isnt it, that so many of the operatives-for-sale wound up associated with Trump in some fashion?

The report raises not only the gloomy prospect of a worldwide decline in democracy, human rights and electoral politics but also an increased threat of international conflicts from rogue states seeking to satisfy nationalist sentiment at home and compensate for economic failure. Freedom House has interesting advice for Western politicians:

We urge responsible political figures to call out colleagues or rivals when they show contempt for basic democratic ideas. Until now, politicians in the democracies have been unimpressive in their responses to opponents who embrace authoritarian figures like Putin. This is despite the overwhelming evidence of egregious crimes under Putins rule: murdered journalists and political opposition leaders, the invasion of neighboring states, brutish counterinsurgency campaigns in the North Caucasus, the emasculation of a once-vibrant media sector, rigged elections, and much more. If they choose to shower him with praise, political leaders like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Donald Trump should be forced to account for the realities of Putins appalling record. The same is true for any politician who praises dictators in the Middle East, Asia, or Africa.

Maybe seen in this light, Secretary of State Rex Tillersons attempt to split off values from our strategic interests is nonsensical. Democratic governments are in our strategic interest and to the extent we lend a hand even rhetorically to non-democratic leaders, we are slitting our own throats and undercutting the international liberal order that has prevented world war and spread prosperity for 70 years.

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Freedom House: Democracy is losing - Washington Post (blog)

The government registration gateway was tedious Matt Morley (far left) and Jeremy Evans (far right), with collaborators Jay Baykara and Josh Balfour in Newspeak House. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Theres an infuriating gap in the coverage of this election. It lies between the idea that the internet has changed everything and any detail of what might have happened on the internet. This gap has been filled with a bit of noise about Facebook ads and echo-chamber Twitter feeds.

But, in fact, civic tech is a real thing, featuring real people, with real technical expertise, trying to hack around every democratic deficiency. They are trying to tackle everything from a sheer lack of easily accessible information to the shortcomings of the first-past-the-post system. They dont just exist. A lot of them exist in the same building: Newspeak House in east London. Its a community space for political technologists according to its founder, 32-year-old Ed Saperia. In practice, that means that it looks like a Silicon Valley startup exposed concrete, free-flowing nachos, a pool table.

Tom de Grunwald is working on a vote-swapping website, SwapMyVote, which is trying to hack the problem of first-past-the-post. Look, he explains, this isnt working at all. In 2015, 74.4% of votes were wasted [they werent cast for the eventual winners]. It causes so many problems, from voter apathy to the difficulty of setting up new parties. Even the fact that we never argued with Ukip properly because people took it for granted that they were just extremists who would never cut through. If they had been getting the seats that reflected their popularity, we would have been arguing with them for 10 or 15 years by now.

These civic tech entrepreneurs are not happy with the old-school duality that we know something is broken but accept it as completely normal. Everyone here is used to iterating very quickly. If the product isnt working, you change the product to make it work.

I first came here two weeks ago to interview a Bernie Sanders campaigner, thinking it was just a hot-desking space, and noticed a few things: phrases such as electoral data uttered with a rare enthusiasm, open-ended questions along the lines of what if we took the progressive alliance concept and applied it not just to voting, but to campaigning? Could we build an app for that?

Some people, in groups of twos and threes, were working on a political matchmaking website (you say what ideas or policies you agree with, and it matches you to a candidate). Others were campaigning for online voting; some just building a centralised list of candidates, something that, remarkably, the government doesnt do. Some were fighting education cuts, some were pushing voter registration, some were fighting fake news. There was a lot of cross-pollination, and a palpable sense of possibility.

On that first visit, I sidled over to Sym Roe from Democracy Club, who I had come across during the EU referendum, when he was building a polling-station-finder tool. Can you give me five minutes? he asks, with anxious courtesy. I think were just about to solve something. This, in the scheme of the 2017 election fly-on-the-walling, is not something I have heard anywhere else.

James Moulding, 24, is a political analyst at Crowdpac, the Steve Hilton/Paul Hilder cross-Atlantic project that crowdfunds for candidates and campaigns. Independently from that, he has cocreated an air-quality-monitoring startup and is working on how you would crowdsource a manifesto. The latter technique has been employed by Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos, but the example the techies all use is Taiwan, where the government does real-time consultation with its citizens using the pol.is platform. This, incidentally, was Ed Saperias driving motivation in setting up Newspeak; the realisation that all the parties right now are faking it. They are putting together platforms that they hope some people will support, rather than finding ways for their policies to be cocreated.

Mouldings core business today is a computer game modelled on the French socialist candidate Jean-Luc Mlenchons Fiscal Kombat, in which a French president shakes bankers until money comes out of them. Mouldings version, Corbyn Run, is better. A man runs past. Why is he sweating? I ask. Because hes a bureaucrat. Also, hes running. Corbyn catches him, shakes the money out of his pockets and then does the same to a few bankers. Its made by Labour party members, he says sternly, not the Labour party. This mix of activity some shallow, some profound, some fun, some not fun at all (there is nothing playful about creating mobile sensor networks to produce air quality data) is typical, though everything is marked by a sense of urgency.

Elections are not really mostly what we think about, here, Saperia says. The thing thats fascinated me, for as long as I can remember, is how humans can successfully interact at scale; in a way that we think is good and meaningful. If you wanted to have a conversation with 10,000 people, how could you do that? Wikipedia is a really good example of thousands of people creating something great, through communicating. Whereas Facebook is quite atomising; everyone sticks to their small groups.

In 2014, he was asked by the Green party for digital help with their membership surge. He had never previously been interested in party politics. Thats when I realised that this whole political ecosystem is not functioning very well. He made a diagram of civil society: one-third education, media, journalism and academia; one-third civil service, local authorities, government, parliament; and one-third unions, activists, party members, campaigners.

A lot of these people dont know each other. I thought: what this space needs is some community building. These networks in Newspeak are very noticeable lots of the people have links in the electoral commission, or in the Government Digital Service (GDS), or have only just resigned from the civil service.

The election has sharpened everybodys focus. Jeremy Evans, 25, and Matt Morley, 22, usually run the fact-card startup explaain.com, but have given themselves full-time to GE2017.com. The site pushed voter registration with a tool for students, where they could check which constituency home or college their vote would make the most difference in. It came up with Vauxhall as a potential swing between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, something that didnt show up in any polling I had seen. Weve got an algorithm that takes in many factors, including betting odds. Where do you get those? We scrape data from actually, I cant tell you that.

Morley and Evans can tell me how many people landed on the registration page 100,000 and how many clicked on the link 72% but beyond sending the link, we have no idea. Only the GDS has that information, Evans says. The government gateway was tedious; [it] put people off [and] made them think they needed their national insurance number when they didnt.

Now the registration deadline has passed, GE2017 has moved on, with a quiz that matches you to a party, not unlike Crowdpacs matchmaker quiz. Fragmentation is one of the problems we wanted to solve. There were about six or seven who-should-I-vote-for? apps at the last election, all of them got between 100,000 and a million hits. We spoke to the Electoral Commission about having a state-sponsored app they have one in Germany. We wanted to make it semi-official, get everyone under one roof, build a really, really good one. Events overtook them, and there wasnt time. Once you have done your quiz, there are a couple of telling links: a link to a longer quiz; a link to SwapMyVote; a link to how to spoil your ballot. Most people think you can just draw a cock, but it wont be included in the official results unless you do a straight line through all the candidates. Even now, Matt and I arent completely clear on it. He thought you did a line through the page on the left, and I thought you did it through the candidates. Its amazing how difficult it is to find this information. Im still not clear on whether you can draw a line and then draw a cock.

Across the desk, Areeq Chowdhury, 24, is working single-handedly on WebRoots Democracy, which started as a campaign for online voting but has evolved into a thinktank covering the use of personal data, fake news, e-petitions, voter advice applications. His own evolution (not counting the one that brought him here, having studied economics and political science, through KMPG, into the civil service, which he quit a month ago) is interesting. It started as the glaring answer to how to get young people to vote, but it soon became clear that the main beneficiaries would be disabled people, those who were bedridden, or with very limited vision. The Royal National Institute of Blind People estimated that 1.4 million people struggled to vote in 2015. They do it with braille, but a lot of people dont read braille any more.

Newspeak runs fellowships, one of whom is Sophie Chesney, 26. She is studying for a PhD in computer science at Queen Mary and her field is natural language processing specifically, Im looking at the automatic detection of misleading headlines. It sounds like, if it came off, an algorithm for the discovery of fake news, but she chooses her words carefully and makes no outlandish claims. If the text is making an exaggerating claim, that may be linked to a negative sentiment. But Im not at the moment experimentally ready to show that.

Democracy Club has been running since 2009, set up by Sym Roe and Joe Mitchell. It is run on no money: Roe does six months contracting as a software engineer, then six months unpaid for Democracy Club. A lot of people here are doing really cool stuff, but were doing the boring bits: aggregation work, creating data that is open for everyone to use. He is doing a centralised list of candidates, and for the 2016 and 2017 local elections, we created a database of all 16,000 candidates, and all of that was open data. They have partnered with the Electoral Commission, and had support from Google and Twitter. The work does sound quite boring but incredibly good for amassing contacts. I was working in digital government, for the DWP and the Ministry of Justice. A lot of it is knowing the way the civil service works. Also, being a white, middle-class man who works as a software developer. That helps.

As we are speaking, something interrupts my vision from the left, and a man who looks like a Stone Roses fan is crouched on the floor, with his arms reaching up to Roes keyboard. This, it transpires later, is Michael Smethurst from the Parliamentary Digital Service. Along with Anya Somerville, a parliamentary librarian, and Ben Woodhams, who originally worked for Hansard and slid into change management, Smethurst is engaged in trying to make the parliamentary website more functional; they come into Newspeak House periodically. We cant really editorialise parliament, its not our job. There might be 500 statutory instruments of which two are of any interest. Its not our job to pick out those two. Yet any meaningful access to democracy requires that the citizen can navigate the terrain. These mini institutions whether Democracy Club or mySociety (which created the seamlessly influential TheyWorkForYou.com) collate, editorialise, create digital order for the public good. The more transparent and accessible democracy is, the more obvious it is which bits could be better. Its like sitting in on the meeting where they invented dentistry, or clean water: kind of obvious, kind of earth-shattering, kind of tedious, kind of magical.

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Democracy? There's an app for that the tech upstarts trying to 'hack' British politics - The Guardian

Labour and the Green party have called for the legislation to be repealed, while the Lib Dems and the SNP have urged reform. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Charities have been forced to change their key messages to the public during the general election because of the chilling effect of the controversial Lobbying Act, a group of leading UK organisations has warned.

Democratic debate on some of the biggest issues in the election campaign has been stifled by the law, a group of more than 50 charities writes in a letter sent to the main party leaders.

Voices are being lost at this crucial time, and our democracy is poorer for it, they said. Their concerns echo those of many charities, particularly in the field of social care, which told the Guardian they were unable to raise vital concerns over, and experiences of, the impacts of current and future policies.

The Lobbying Act restricts what non-governmental organisations can say in the year before a general election. Billed as a brake on corporate lobbying as well as NGOs when it was brought in, its provisions have fallen harder on the non-profit sector, leading to an independent commission and the House of Lords recommending amendments.

In their letter sent on Monday, more than 50 UK charities called for the urgent reform of the controversial legislation, which they said was having a chilling effect on debates over policy ahead of Thursdays snap election. They warned that charities were weighed down by an unreasonable and unfair law which restricts our ability to contribute fully to a democratic society.

The charities come from across the spectrum, representing social care, health, poverty, environment, and vulnerable groups. They include household names such as the Sue Ryder nursing charity, AgeUK, Amnesty, the development charity Care, and Christian Aid.

Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Friends of the Earth charity network, which coordinated the letter along with the Bond group of more than 450 development charities, said: The problem with the Lobbying Act is that it seriously damages charities ability to do their job to work for the greater public good. Important civic voices that speak for the most marginalised are being lost. If the act is not reformed, democracy will suffer.

Tamsyn Barton, chief executive of Bond, added that smaller and poorer charities were among the worst affected as they could not afford legal advice and struggled with the amount of red-tape compliance that the act involves.

Several charities have had to reconsider key publicity and events for fear of falling foul of the act. For instance, Christian Aids annual fundraising week fell after the prime minister Theresa May called the snap election. The charity had to deal with thousands of local activists concerned that their leaflets and fundraising events might fall under the act, and spend time and effort logging every activity closely, because the act makes charities liable for their activities retrospectively.

Several charities said that as well as the provisions of the act, they were concerned that some organisations were censoring themselves, thereby damaging democratic debate.

Greenpeace recently became the first charity to be fined for refusing to be regulated under the law, in an act of civil disobedience.

Theresa Mays decision to call a snap general election caused particular consternation because it means all charities communications in the preceding year fall under the rules retrospectively. When the act was introduced under the coalition, charities were reassured by ministers that parliamentary elections would be on a five-year cycle, giving them time to formulate and publicise key messages ahead of the formal start of any election campaign.

A review by the Conservative peer Lord Hodgson found that the right balance had not been struck in the act as presently drafted, and a House of Lords committee found the rules threaten the vital advocacy role of charities.

Labour and the Green party have called for the legislation to be repealed, while the Liberal Democrats and the SNP have urged reform. Baroness Parminter, the Lib Dem peer, said the act was pernicious and was having a chilling effect on democratic debate.

Within the next few days, the UN special rapporteur will present what is expected to be a critical review of the act and its impact.

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'Chilling' Lobbying Act stifles democracy, charities tell party chiefs ... - The Guardian