The American Human: North Carolina No Longer a Democracy According to International Standards

Sunday, December 25, 2016

North Carolina No Longer a Democracy According to International Standards

A study shows that North Carolina now ranks near Iran, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, and Cuba for electoral integrity. Is the U.S. heading there?

Demonstrators protesting voter-id laws at the North Carolina House.

North Carolina has gone beyond a state that passes a law permitting discrimination against LBGT citizens and voter-id laws admittedly designed to reduce minority participation. They designed district boundaries that prevent real democracy from taking place.

According to a recent look at the 2016 election by experts in judging international elections found that North Carolina did not make the grade:

In the just released EIP [Electoral Integrity Project] report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

Got that? A key swing state -- that didn't swing this year -- has devolved to such an extent that the barest majority of the electorate, Republicans, can hold 100 percent of the political power over the rest of the electorate, Democrats, who hold 0 percent of the political power, all due to the illegitimacy of the way Republicans drew district boundaries.

Then, when the state as a whole elects a Democrat to punish the Republican governor for signing a pro-discrimination bill (that cost the state hundreds of millions in lost revenue through boycotts), said lame-duck governor signs bills the Republican-controlled legislature passes in a lame-duck special session called to strip as much power as possible from the new Democratic governor, leaving the office of the governor the least powerful it's been in state history.

Holy shit, America. Read the whole article and weep. Is more of America headed this way? It will if red-state Republicans get their way.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html#storylink=cp

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About the American Human

The American Human is written by Calvin Ross, a retired teacher who at various points in life has been a musician, woodworker, restaurateur, narrator, English teacher in Japan, novelist, technology journalist, and private tutor to Japanese children here in the U.S.

Happily residing in the wine country of Sonoma County north of San Francisco, Calvin has lived in the Philippines, the Netherlands, and the aforementioned Japan, as well as in Chicago, Colorado, Georgia, and many different towns in California, including, of all places, the Mojave Desert.

Calvin, you may note quickly, is a liberal progressive who doesn't think being called a socialist is all that bad, especially since he sort of would like living in Denmark if it weren't so cold. He blogs because he can.