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From left to right: Edelman, Lane, Rodgers, and Schappele are seated at a University Center for Human Valuespanel to discuss democracy and global liberalism.

By Ruby Shao

Democracy around the world is being distorted by external forces and corroded from within by officials who fail to conform to its processes and values, according to politics professor and University Center for Human Values director Melissa Lane, who presented the argument at a panel on Friday, Jan. 20.

The challenges we face, from nativism, to the role of money, and ethics and public policy, and the fate of democratic rhetorics and the state of our public sphere, are now being played out literally as we speak, moderator and history professor Jeremy Adelman explained.

He emphasized some downsides of globalization in the form of civic discord, rising inequality, the rise of populism, and slow and exclusive economic growth, as manifested in events like Brexit, the United States presidential election, and the destruction of Aleppo.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs in the Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values, noted that the number of electoral liberal democracies in good standing peaked about ten years ago, and has been declining since then. In this case, liberalism is a political doctrine that requires the government to protect the liberty of the individual.

She cited political sociologist Larry Diamond's finding that, from 2000 through 2015, liberal democracies collapsed in 27 countries. Liberal values have declined in far more countries than they have improved in during the past decade, according to Freedom House, Scheppele added.

Opponents of liberalism decry it using three main tropes, Lane said. Undecidability refers to the charge that scientific evidence never decides the fundamental questions, so that ordinary people can reject expert opinions. Indecision depicts liberals as too cowardly to act. Impotence accuses liberals of lacking the ability to fix today's problems.

Liberalism is threatening to devour its own parents while potentially being devoured by its own children, Lane added.

She explained that bureaucracy, which served as the scaffolding with which liberals extended rights and liberties to more and more groups, is buckling under disrespect for expertise, conventions, and institutions. Meanwhile, liberalism has helped produce the environmental crisis, largely by failing to regulate businesses enough. She called for remedying both these issues as steps toward preserving liberalism.

Focusing on the American case, history professor emeritus Dan Rodgers noted that recent months marked the most unpredictable start to the beginning of a presidency since at least the 18th century, when some wondered whether George Washington might try to revive a democratic monarchy. Nobody knows whether Trump will usher in an era of effective negotiations, quasi-organized chaos, or scandal, he said.

Rather than optimistically believing the United States Constitution will withstand contemporary pressures, Americans should consider all the constitutions across the globe that have fallen victim to leaders she calls constitutional autocrats, Scheppele warned.

Constitutional autocrats win elections, Scheppele said. But upon taking office, they undercut liberalism. First, they attack the constitution to remove checks on executive power, under the guise of increasing efficiency. They then try to control key institutions. These include the judiciary, because it can label their actions unconstitutional or illegal, and the media, because it can publish alternatives to the narratives created by the autocrats. They also discredit the non-governmental organization sector, which covers human rights and transparency groups, as partisan or elitist and therefore untrustworthy.

Next, the constitutional autocrats insert loyalists into the prosecutor's office, tax authority, police and security services. They delegitimize the political opposition as outdated, corrupt, or otherwise unworthy of attention. Rewriting the election laws skews the following election in their favor. They bypass middlemen by moving to direct democracy; hence the proliferation of referenda as well as social media rather than traditional news outlets to communicate with the public. Conventions that have bound all their predecessors, like the rules of fair play and civility, stop applying to them.

Finally, constitutional autocrats attack the constitution by arguing that it should be replaced, or that it must be rescued from enemy hands, Scheppele said. The goal of the game becomes to change the game's rules, a development that makes the system unsustainable.

Lane suggested the trend was starting to affect the United States.

Not releasing taxes, not appointing to the Supreme Court, not even holding a hearing to appoint to the Supreme Court, not requiring the nominees for the Cabinet positions to all complete the ethics checks before being confirmed these are actually really fundamental norms that have already just fallen by the wayside, and once they're gone, it's very difficult to get them back, she said.

Scheppele noted that checks and balances in the Constitution depend on every institution defending its institutional prerogatives against those of other institutions. For that reason, she worried about the unprecedented alignment of all American institutions in a single direction at a critical moment. The Republicans control the presidency and both houses of Congress, and will probably dominate the Supreme Court. Most crucially, they direct 33 out of 50 state governments. Wielding more power than any party has had since the 1930s, the Republicans are introducing one-party rule, she said.

However, Rodgers countered that the divisions within the party may well produce effective checks and balances, as the party represents small government whereas Trump embodies autocracy. Characterizing liberalism as a movement of the national and international, Rodgers called for it to survive by returning to the local, the arena occupied by dissatisfied Americans. Local and state politics will continue to hold the most importance for people's daily lives, he added, giving examples like property taxation, school policies, police procedures, criminal justice, and gun control.

It's also where democratic deliberation is more possible, where one can find oneself to some extent insulated from the highly polarized media system in which we live, in which the powers of organized money don't intrude quite so heavily. It's where people might actually listen to each other, pay attention to each other, do what we think of in democracy as the act of participation in politics, deliberative reasoning. It's where some of the anger that's turned this election upside down might be redirected in more constructive ways, Rodgers said.

Titled Global Liberalism in Crisis? the roundtable discussion was sponsored by the Department of History, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Department of Politics, and the University Center for Human Values. It took place at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 20, in Robertson Bowl 16.

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Panel discusses how external forces distort democracy - The Daily Princetonian

Democracy, for many, is dead or just about to be. The outgoing US president has reflected on the fragility of this fabric to hold the weight of the mass. No doubt, democracy was one of the best ideas of the 20th century which took it for granted that people will speak their minds and shape their future. But it turned out quite on the contrary not only in the postcolonial democracies but also in developed ones as well. As a public enterprise model of politics, 120 countries and 63 per cent of the world population is currently living under the democratic shield. If the 20th century could hold the democratic fabric intact, the 21st century witnesses its setbacks as nominal establishments with autocratic and kleptocratic elements largely ruining the institutions and systems.

The founders of modern democracy (say like John Stuart Mill and James Madison) regarded it as a powerful, but imperfect tool for governance. The imperfect element proved powerful for its way forward in many of the under-developed, newly independent and post colonial nations. Michel Kalecki used the term intermediate regimes to the governing establishments in these countries, where the lower middle class and the rich peasantry were identified to perform the role of the ruling class.

Accordingly, whenever social upheavals brought the representatives of the lower middle class to power, they invariably served the interests of the big business often aligned with the remnants of the feudal system. By virtue of their numerical size, the lower middle class (in a democratic frame of elections) succeeded in coming to power. The state under these regimes was expected to play the role of dynamic enterprises and undertake investments to maintain and improve economic growth and ensure development and distribution. They tried to deliver to the interests of the lower middle class (stake holders) with state capitalism as a special purpose vehicle.

Kaleckian theory found that to fulfil these requirements, the ruling regimes had to gain a measure of independence from the foreign capital and carry out land reforms to ensure social equity and establish upward growth of the economy. The regimes however, faced severe resistance from the imperial capitalists and the feudal landlords to achieve these essential and enabling requisites. This recognised them of the imperative to compromise with the upper middle class and international capital. The compromise levels reached the extent of reckoning them as forces capable of threatening the existence of the regime itself. To remain in power, obviously the regimes had to identify other routeskleptocratic and collaborative. Incompatible partners in this route added to the imperfection of governing tool.

The relevance of this pattern in the Indian context has been debated in the 70s. In 1973, K N Raj by relating the sequence of political events and administrative patterns, established its relevance. However, it was rejected by E M S Nampoothirppad through a different logic: Comparing the nature of power transmission from the imperialistic hands to their local loyalists. He argued further that the very description of the alignment of class forces makes it clear that the concept does not apply to India. This gave birth to new appreciative theoretical debates. One inference from these debates is: If the power is acquired by the recipient regime in a dominating position, then the political power can be consolidated systematically in collaboration with the interest groups.

It is not meant here to argue that democracy has deteriorated only in the post-colonial countries. Rather, there is an aversion to this governance tool across the spectrum by virtue of the imperfection it inherited en-route. This prompted to pin point the elements that were (probably) instrumental in deteriorating the democracy. The two prominent causes identified in this context are the financial crisis (recession of 2007-08) and (2) the rise of China as a global power. The Chinese communist party is said to have broken the democratic worlds claim of establishing economic well being. For instance, if the US was doubling living standards every 30 years, China could do it in 10 years (The Economist, 2014)

Further, the democracies in the global space have reoriented its approach and outlook. It has become a rewarding operation for the loyalists making the democratic political establishments become self-serving. Platos worry about democracy turned out for rightcitizens would live from day to day, indulging in the pleasure of the moment. Democratic governments got into the habit of borrowing to meet the short term needs of the people while evading the long run investments required for improving living standards. For sure, they are uncertain of their long term power position. This got into a vicious cycle and resulted in the decline of visible political loyalists, thus increasing occurrences of concentration of power and wealth with few.

It is interesting to note that the share of political party memberships are on the decline across developed democracies. For instance, only one per cent of the British population are members of political parties in 2014 as compared to 20 per cent in 1950 (The Economist, 2014). If one observed, the big debate in the 2015 British elections had been on the inequalities and the economic biases facing the peoplethe growing inequalities and the failures of the capitalist system to hold democracy straight. It is estimated that the collective wealth of Britains richest has more than doubled in ten years. Worldwide studies further confirm that more than half of the voters do not have trust in their governments. If kleptocracy potentially can deliver and replace democracy, should we let it fade away?

C S SUNDARESAN President of Alliance for Advanced Research and Development Initiatives, an independent think tank

Email: cs.sundaresan@hotmail.com

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Democracy on the decline - The New Indian Express

Common Dreams

We Are MourningBut We Are Marching And Organizing for Democracy and the Earth Common Dreams For democracy: we must have universal automatic voter registration, transparent voter registration rolls, a four-day national holiday for voting, elimination of all electronic voting machines, universal hand-counted paper ballots, automatic recounts at ...

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We Are MourningBut We Are Marching And Organizing for Democracy and the Earth - Common Dreams

Greeces prime minister Alexis Tsipras at a party meeting in the Greek parliament last May: The whole of Europe has a Grecian feel now. Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

Hard questions for democracies have piled up with a speed we have yet to take in. After the cold war, westerners asked how to stand up to autocrats. Should we intervene to stop genocide in Bosnia? Or demand sanctions and boycotts to protect the rights of Tibetans? The rise of communist China, Putins Russia and Erdoans Turkey changed the terms of debate. The question was no longer should we intervene, but could we intervene against powers more than able to resist pressure?

Now that the Trump administration has slouched towards Washington to be born and strongmen have muscled their way into the chancelleries of eastern Europe, the question is more basic: how are supposed democracies different from actual dictatorships?

Greece, the birthplace of democracy, is rarely included in the list of countries that have sunk into corrupt and mendacious authoritarianism. The fact that Syriza is held to be a leftwing rather than a rightwing populist regime is thought to be a distinction of supreme importance by the kind of people who think Paul Mason is an intellectual. Yet the arrival in power of the coalition of the radical left did not stop the corruption scandals in Greek politics. Nor did it usher in a new age of freedom.

Instead, Syriza has shown that concepts of left and right cannot explain the brute realities of 21st-century power. They are almost an irrelevance now. If Donald Trump is right wing, for instance, why do free-market conservatives and national security Republicans fear him so? If Syriza is left wing, why is it in alliance with the ultra-nationalists and religious obscurantists of the Independent Greeks party?

As always, you must never let your eye be distracted from the constraints that bind the powerful and the violence with which they fight against them. This week, the Greek supreme court, the Areopagus, may, at its governments behest, overturn a constraint that has bound European governments since the fall of the 20th-century tyrannies. The Greek novelist Apostolos Doxiadis tells me he has dropped his writing to campaign about a case that goes to the heart of what Europe thinks it is and what it is in danger of becoming.

Greeces degeneration into a baklava republic would be bad enough on its own

Here is why. On 16 July 2016, the night of the doomed coup against Recep Erdoan, three Turkish search-and-rescue crews were ordered by their commanding officer to pick up casualties from an emergency situation in the centre of Istanbul. Their helicopters met intense gunfire. They saved who they could and retreated back to base.

By their account, they had no foreknowledge of the coup. They could not raise their commanders on their return. But when they turned on the television and saw soldiers being lynched, eight of the airmen decided to flee to Greece. Their reason for thinking they would find sanctuary may soon leave a bitter taste: because it is Europe.

For them and millions of others, Europe was as much an idea as a continent. After the defeat of fascism and communism, and in Greeces case the overthrow of the colonels junta in 1974, Europe stood for the rule of law and human rights. By definition, it opposed those familiar instruments from the age of the dictators: arbitrary arrest, show trials, torture and the death penalty.

Erdoan has used the excuse of the coup to purge Turkish society of every potential centre of opposition. To check off the above list, Erdoans forces have arrested Kurdish politicians for being Kurds. They have used the flimsiest of pretexts to put journalists on trial for spreading terrorist propaganda. To the surprise of no one, defence lawyers have made credible accusations of torture. Meanwhile, Turkeys nationalist right is campaigning to restore the death penalty.

The eight officers were arrested within hours of landing. Far from respecting due process and the rule of law, Erdoan was able to boast that Syrizas leader and the luckless Greeks prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, had assured me the officers will be extradited. Tsipras did not contradict the implicit accusation that he was interfering with the Greek courts.

The only evidence offered by the Turkish state against the officers is the unanswered phone calls they made to their commander, who has since been arrested as a participant in the putsch. The officers say they were merely seeking further instructions from their superiors amid the confusion.

In a well-run country, the courts would ignore the prime minister. Its not that simple in Greece. Doxiadis, who has the outrage of a Greek Zola, says: In a true democracy, Mr Tsiprass kowtowing to Mr Erdoan would be merely contemptible, a blatant attempt to gain personal favour at the expense of human rights. But in todays Greece they are cause for great alarm. The president of the Greek supreme court is a government appointee. We will soon find out how far the independence of the Greek judiciary extends.

Greeces degeneration into a baklava republic would be bad enough on its own. The story of that degeneration is also worth retelling as a warning to the political equivalent of sex tourists to stop getting their rocks off on fantasies about socialist governments far from home.

But the case of the airmen is wider than that. The whole of Europe has a Grecian feel now. The EU cut a deal with Erdoan to keep out the refugees, whose presence on Europes streets has provoked a continent-wide backlash. Talk to him too harshly and he could tear it up. If Trump allies with Putin, the rest of Nato may not think they can stand up to Russia alone. As for isolated Britain, its leaders will find every excuse to sell arms to every dictatorship from Riyadh to Beijing. Any trade will soon be better than no trade.

The only argument against appeasement is the realistic argument that it will not work. Erdoan has gone mad. He roams around his 1,000-room palace ranting against his opponents. Putin, likewise, has made it clear that the west is his enemy. Nothing we can do will make him change his mind.

As fate would have it, the Greek supreme court was named after the Areopagus of classical Athens, which heard the trials of antiquity. Aeschylus in the Oresteia sent Orestes there to seek protection from the Furies. Athena tells him:

Whether eight Turkish airmen can find justice and avert the bitter blame is not just a question for them, but for a continent tormented by Furies of its own.

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Fate of eight Turkish airmen is an acid test for democracy - The Guardian

Donald Trump was right: The election was rigged. What Trump got wrong (and, boy, does he get things wrong) is that the rigging worked in his favor. The manipulations took three monumental forms: Russian cyber-sabotage; FBI meddling; and systematic Republican efforts, especially in swing states, to prevent minority citizens from casting votes. The cumulative effect was more than sufficient to shift the outcome in Trumps favor and put the least qualified major-party candidate in the history of the republic into the White House.

Trumpist internet trolls andTrump himselfdismiss such concerns as sour grapes, but for anyone who takes seriously the importance of operating a democracy, these assaults on the nations core political process constitute threats to the countrys very being. Lets look at each of these areas of electoral interference in detail.

Gone phishing: the drone of info warfare

Suppose one morning you receive an email from your internet service provider telling you a security breach has put your data at risk. You are instructed to reset your password immediately. In keeping with the urgency of the situation, the email that delivers the warning provides a link to the page where your new password can be entered. Anxiously you do as instructed, hoping youve acted soon enough to prevent a disaster.

Congratulations: You have successfully reset your password. Unfortunately, you have also provided it to the hackers who sent the original, entirely bogus warning about a breach of security. This kind of ploy is called phishing. Its exactly how theemail accountof John Podesta, Hillary Clintons campaign chair, was penetrated. His assistants fell for the ruse.

Alternatively, a phisher might send dozens of intriguing offers to employees of a certain organization over the course of weeks. Each message provides a link for more information, and as soon as someone in a moment of boredom or confusion clicks on it,presto change-o,the hacker is inside that persons computer, free to worm through the network to which its connected. This is how hackers got into the computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and downloaded not just emails but strategic planning documents and other confidential information.

At this point no one aside from Trump die-hards and maybe Trump himself he has said so many contradictory things on the subject, its difficult to tell what he actually believes denies that the hackers were Russian and acted under some kind of official instruction, even possibly from the highest levels of Kremlin authority, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moreover, its clear that the harvest of stolen material was used to help Trump and hurt Clinton. This is the unambiguous conclusion of a National Intelligence Communityreportreleased on Jan. 6 and representing the shared conclusions of the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, which stated: Russias goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

None of the meddling was as blatantly subversive as taking electronic control of voting machines and altering vote counts. Nor did the Russian hackers disable vote-tallying computers, as theydid in Ukrainein 2014, but they achieved the next best thing. In our information-drenched world, the drumbeat of background noise can be as powerful as what one hears in the foreground. The Russians and their allies, in part through WikiLeaks, parceled out the juiciest tidbits from the stolen material over the course of the summer and fall, and the news media ate it up.

The Democratic dirty laundry they aired showed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the DNC, favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. In the ensuing flap, Wasserman Schultz resigned and the public was left with the message that the DNC was both untrustworthy and in disarray and indeed, following the chairs departure, the disarray couldnt have been more real. When other emails were released in which Podesta and various colleagues second-guessed Clintons decisions, the message that lingered in the public mind was that even her closest associates had doubts about her, never mind that candid, water-cooler criticism is normal in any undertaking.

The Russians did more than merely steal computer information. They also planted false news stories, both with state sanction (according to the national intelligence report) and without it. One of the upshots of the faux-news business is that, amid intense click-bait competition for advertisers, only sites and articles pandering to the far rightmake money. Disseminating made-up stories favorable to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders returned nothing to the bottom line of the freelance hackers operating in what has become one of the Russian-speaking worlds newest cottage industries. Evidently a suspension of critical thinking or its complete absence is easier to exploit among those disposed to hate liberals and love Trump.

That this kind of gullibility is more than just politically dangerous became clear in December when Edgar Welch of Salisbury, N.C.,stormedinto Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., filled mainly with parents and children. Welch was carrying a handgun and an assault rifle, which he fired. He later explained that he intended to self-investigate reports that had been ricocheting around the internet asserting that Hillary Clinton and John Podestaoperateda child trafficking ring out of that restaurant. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

The hoax that fooled the benighted Edgar Welch first appeared on the internet in late October, shortly before the election. Via Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other platforms, users subsequently clicked it onward several million times. Among theenthusiastic retweetersof this sort of claptrap (if not the specific Comet Ping Pong story) was retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whom Trump has named his national security adviser, a position for a modicum of probity, if not honesty, used to be a requirement. (Flynns son did, however,promotethe Comet story on social media.)

In the echo chamber of the internet, the drone of half-truths and lies blurs the edges of the real. Eventually, it imparts a kind of lazy, unevaluated validity to memes of all kinds:Hillary is a crook, immigrants are criminals, Muslims are terrorists. In such a world, Trumps chronic mendacity becomes unremarkable. This is political branding, advertising and product definition in the twenty-first century. Its part of what the spinmeisters callseizing the narrative, and the more you seize it for your side, the harder it becomes for your opponents to make their case. Truth is beside the point.

Russian faux-news stories, purloined emails and exfiltrated documents dogged the Democratic campaign. They were like gnats that packed a painful bite, buzzing continually wherever Clinton went. They distracted the media and the public from Trumps much more substantial sins and reinforced the memes that he and his proxies chanted at every opportunity. They built toward a death by a thousand cuts. That was the background. Then, into the foreground stepped FBI Director James Comey.

Out of line

On Oct. 28, 2016, only 11 days before the election, with early voting already underway in many states, Comey delivered aletterto Congressional leaders stating that, in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation of Hillary Clintons private email server. They were, devastatingly enough, on a computer that scandal-ridden former Congressman Anthony Weiner had shared with his wife and Clinton aide Huma Abedin. At the time, Comey did not have a warrant to inspect those emails or any idea what the emails specifically contained. He released his letterin violationof longstanding Justice Department procedures and contrary to direct advice from Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The most sympathetic thing that might be said about Comeys rogue gambit was that he felt a muddle-headed sense of obligation to keep the public and, more particularly, Republican members of Congress informed about developments in an investigation that he had declared resolved nearly four months earlier. A darker interpretation is that he dropped his bomb intending to help the Trump campaign, which, if true, would constitute a violation of theHatch Actand entitle him to an extended stay in a facility populated by people he used to prosecute. We may never know his motives in full, but it is rumored that he willoffersome kind of statement soon.

Motives aside, Comeys letter detonated across the late-stage election landscape. Predictably the media went into overdrive, as did Trump. With his usual bombast heproclaimedthat this is bigger than Watergate, and the spinning went on from there. Clintons polling numbers nosedived. On Nov. 5, Comey issued a follow-up letter in which he conceded that, um, well, the trove of emails added absolutely nothing new to the previously dormant investigation. This 11th hour admission did little to mend the damage already inflicted on Clinton and may, in fact, only have deepened the injury by keeping the item in the news and underscoring the suspicions many voters felt toward her.

Nate Silver atFiveThirtyEightsuggested that the flap may have cost Clinton a three-point swing among the electorate and calculated that, after the Comey bombshell hit, the probability of her winning the presidency plunged by 16 percent. He also suggested that Comeys letter may have influenced down-ballot races, especially in the all-important struggle for control of the Senate.Bloombergreportedeven more dramatic numbers, finding that Clintons 12-point lead eroded to a single percentage point, making the race essentially a dead heat.

Digging deeply into the Comey Effect, Sean McElwee and his colleagues atVoxfound that itcorrelatedwith sharp downturns for Clinton in both national and state polling, probably accounting for a surge toward Trump that was particularly pronounced among late-deciders people who made up their minds only when they were at the brink of going to the polls. Moreover, the surge was likely shaped by an astonishing peak in the negative news coverage of Clinton, centering on her emails. In the last week of the campaign, 37 percent of all coverage of Clinton was scandal-related, far higher than had been the case for months.

These are powerful statistics. Three percentage points in an election in whichnearly 129 million ballotswere cast for the top two candidates amounted to 3.87 million votes. Add them to the 2.86 million by which Clinton beat Trump in thepopular vote, and you have a victory margin more than a million and a half votes larger than that by which Obama beat Romney in 2012. You also have a big win in the Electoral College. People would have been talking about a landslide.

As things turned out, Trumps victory in the Electoral College was determined by fewer than a combined 100,000 votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. You can massage the numbers many different ways, but if Comeys letter accounted for only 2 percent of Trumps votes in those states, then without the letter Clinton would have won all three of them and the presidency.

Elections are always contingent: Weird stuff happens. In 1960, Richard Nixonhit his kneeon a car door moments before the first-ever televised presidential debate. Hed just had surgery on the knee to combat a staph infection, and the pain from the swelling bump undermined his performance.

Its an old story: For want of a nail, a shoe is lost, for want of a shoe, a horse, and the rest is history. But the intervention of a high government official on a completely politicized hot-button issue at the apex of a presidential campaign is unprecedented in American history. It exceeds by orders of magnitude the contingencies of elections past.

Voter suppression

In the last year or two did you receive a postcard from election authorities asking you to confirm your present address? I did. Those postcards originate from Operation Crosscheck, a brainchild of Kris Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, in which 27 states collaborated to uncover the identities of citizens registered to vote in multiple states. Thats a common enough occurrence since people rarely bother to cancel old registrations when they move from one state to another. Sounds benign, right?

Not so. As Greg PalastdetailedinRolling Stonelast August, this purge of voter rolls was methodologically inept and had the effect of disproportionately disenfranchising minority voters.

The crosschecking frequently matched only first and last names, ignoring middle names and suffixes like junior or senior. As a result, common surnames Jones, Washington, Garcia and the like generated huge numbers of matches. The intent of the program was to prevent double voting, a form of voter fraud that the right has frequentlydecriedas widespread, but for which no one has found substantial evidence. (As TheNew York Timesreportedin the wake of election 2016, no significant evidence of voter fraud of any sort was found.) This fake issue has, however, been used as a smokescreen for implementing voting restrictions that inhibit poor people, students and minorities, who usually vote Democratic, from exercising their franchise.

Poor people, as Palast points out, are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. If your name is Washington, theres an 89-percent chance youre African-American. If your last name is Hernandez, theres a 94-percent chance youre Hispanic. If your name is Kim, theres a 95-percent chance youre Asian.

Crosscheck sent7.2 million matchesto the 28 originally participating states. (Oregon dropped out when its officials realized the extent of Crosschecks flaws.) Nearly all of them with Republican secretaries of state then handled matters as they saw fit, eliminating an estimated 1.1 million voters from their rolls. Virginia, for instance, dropped more than 41,000 registrations as inactive shortly before the election. In many cases, state authorities sent voters cryptic, small-print postcards like the one I received.

Undoubtedly, many students and poor voters, who move frequently from apartment to apartment, never even got their postcards, and when they failed to respond, their voter registrations were canceled. In Michigan, which Donald Trump won by 10,704 votes, Crosscheck provided a purge list of 449,922 names. How many of these people were prevented from voting? How many voted but had their ballots disallowed? No one knows for sure, but the situation cries out for sustained and aggressive investigation.

At least 14 states compounded the problems of Operation Crosscheck by creating new,additional obstaclesfor voters, including eliminating early voting on weekends, reducing polling place hours and mandating the use of photo IDs. In Wisconsin, a new voter ID law was sold to the public with promises that the states motor vehicles department would issue appropriate IDs to non-drivers within six business days of application. In actual fact, the process often tooksix to eight weeks. Even an order from a federal court (that found as many as300,000 votersmay have been affected) failed to speed up the turgid Wisconsin bureaucracy.

In the November election, voter turnout in Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,748 votes, was the lowest in 20 years. It fell 13 percent in Milwaukee, where most of the states black voters live. Part of the problem was undoubtedly the unpopularity of the major candidates, but voter suppression seems to have played a significant role too. As Ari Berman of theNationpoints out, the active discouragement of poor and minority citizens from voting not just in Wisconsin, but in Virginia, North Carolina and many other states was undoubtedly the most underreported story of 2016.

Alas, poor Hamilton

The last kind of man whom Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, as architects of the new American republic, saw as a fit head of state was someone modeled on the character of a medieval prince: narcissistic, volatile, cruel, deceitful and as vulnerable to manipulation by flattery as by insult. But Hamilton and Madison were hardly nave. They fully understood that no democracy could be completely immune from such men. In fact, they expected that the House of Representatives, in particular, would ultimately open its doors to a fair share of lunatics, demagogues and nincompoops. History has more than validated this view.

Hamilton and Madison, however, believed that the presidency of the new United States had to be protected from unqualified men at all costs, and so they came up with a plan. They invented the Electoral College. Writing in the Federalist 68 in March 1788, Hamiltonextolledtheir creation and explained,

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.

The inauguration of Donald J. Trump looms. If the old saying about rolling over in ones grave has any substance, Hamilton and Madison should be spinning like turbines.

In truth, our electoral process is broken. Key protections provided by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were gutted in 2013 by a Supreme Court more blatantly political than any in living memory. Right-wingers in North Carolina thereupon ginned up a suite of voting restrictions that, in the words of a federal judge,targetedblack Democratic voters with almost surgical precision. The judge struck down the most egregious provisions of that law, but repressive efforts in North Carolina, Wisconsin and other Crosscheck states will continue to be advanced, as opportunity permits. The vital task is to deny the opportunity.

Meanwhile, James Comey has shown that a lone, rogue public official can interject himself into the most sensitive of national moments in a way that not even his roguish predecessor J. Edgar Hoover would have countenanced. And Vladimir Putin has evidently found the cheapest of methods, using electrons instead of sanctions or guns, to undermine the political institutions of his adversaries and befuddle their people.

The extent to which Trump campaign functionaries maintained links, if any, with Russian operatives remains unknown. On Jan. 11, a35-page documentconsisting of memoranda on Trumps Russian connections, compiled by a researcher hired by his opposition, became public. That document contains allegations ranging from the salacious to the treasonous. Although none of them has been verified, the leaked release of the memoranda hasintensifiedpublic pressure on Trump to offer a full accounting of his relationship with Russian business interests and the Putin regime. Irrespective of whether these lines of inquiry produce information of substance, the fact remains that a foreign, hostile power used subterfuge to interfere with the domestic electoral politics of the United States.

On that last count, many an Iranian, Guatemalan or citizen of any of scores of countries might justifiably say that turnabout is fair play, for the United States has a long andwell-documentedhistory ofmeddlingin other countries elections. The consequences of a breakdown of democracy in the United States, however, are costly for the entire world. Missiles and nuclear codes are at stake. So, too, is the ever-narrowing window for meaningful global action on climate change, not to mention the clout of the worlds largest economy and most powerful military. All of these things, by hook and by crook, have now been entrusted to a man very much like a medieval prince.

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Election rigging 101: Donald Trump's crash course in hijacking democracy - Salon