DEMOCRACY WATCHLessons from Other Democracies: Ideas for Combatting Mistrust and Polarization in US Elections

There remains a crisis of confidence in U.S. elections, despite their successful administration in 2022. Many Americans harbor mistaken beliefs about the outcome of the 2020 elections and the way elections are run, and foreign and domestic bad actors are all too happy to take advantage of that. This problem is exacerbated by widespread polarization, which is threatening to paralyze citizens and public officials from finding ways to address these issues. It’s time for some new ideas.

A new report from the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at the German Marshall Fund and Election Reformers Network (ERN), explores an often overlooked source of ideas to help the United States counter polarization and election mis- and disinformation: other democracies.

Pulling lessons from six countries, including Canada, Sweden, and South Korea, the report’s authors — Rachael Dean Wilson, Kevin Johnson, and David Levine — recommend several solutions the United States can implement to ensure free and fair elections. These include:

·  Incentivizing accountability through ranked choice voting

·  Increasing trust through impartial election administration

·  Providing good information through pre- and debunking

“Virulent polarization and the trust-destroying propagation of election related mis- and disinformation remain acute threats to American democracy,” said report author Rachael Dean Wilson, managing director of ASD at GMF. “Successfully tackling these threats hinges on whether we deploy the best ideas to combat them. No country has a monopoly on good ideas, and we should consider how strategies that helped improve trust in other democracies could be applied in the United States to bolster confidence.”

“Freedom is a universal human aspiration, and so too is a well-functioning democracy on which freedom depends,” said report author Kevin Johnson, executive director of ERN. “Let’s leverage the best ideas available to make our democracy function as well as it possibly can.” 

Here are two sections from the report:

Introduction
Protections are baked into each stage of US election administration. For example, nearly every state has paper records of each vote, safeguards to ensure the chain of custody of those ballots, and the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. Yet, there is a crisis of confidence in US elections. After falling to a record low following the 2020 elections, trust in US elections increased after the 2022 midterms.