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o we live in a democracy? You may well ask. An unelected adviser seems to exercise more power than the prime minister, and appears unanswerable to people or parliament. Boris Johnson makes reckless public health decisions that could put thousands of lives at risk, apparently to dig himself out of a political hole. Parliament is truncated, as the government arbitrarily decides that MPs can no longer take part in votes remotely. As the government blunders from one disaster to the next, there seem to be no effective ways of holding it to account.

Established power in this country is surrounded by a series of defensive rings. As soon as you begin to name them, you see that the UK is a democracy only in the weakest and shallowest sense.

Lets begin with political funding. Our system permits billionaires and corporations to outspend and outmuscle the electorate. The great majority of money for the Conservative party comes from a small number of very rich people. Just five hedge fund managers have given it 18m over the past 10 years. The secretive Leaders Group grants big donors special access to the prime minister and his frontbenchers in return for their money. Courting and cultivating rich people to win elections corrupts our politics, replacing democracy with plutocracy.

This grossly unfair system is supplemented by outright cheating, such as breaching spending limits and secretly funding mendacious online ads. The Electoral Commission, which is supposed to regulate the system, has deliberately been kept powerless. The maximum fine for winning an election (or a referendum) by fraud is 20,000 per offence. Democracy is cheap in this country.

Despite such assistance, the Conservatives still failed to win a majority of votes at the last election. But, thanks to our preposterous, outdated first-past-the-post electoral system, the 43.6% of the vote they won granted them a crushing majority. With proportional representation, we would have a hung parliament. Five years of unassailable power for Johnsons Conservatives, even as popular support collapses, would have been impossible.

The structure and symbolism of parliament, with its preposterous rituals and incomprehensible procedures, could scarcely be better designed to alienate people, or to favour former public schoolboys, educated in a similar environment. Even its official emblem tells us we are shut out. Its a portcullis: the means by which people are excluded from the fortress of power. The portcullis is topped by a crown, reminding us that power is still vested symbolically in an unelected head of state. Many of her actual powers have been assumed, in the absence of a codified constitution, by the prime minister.

These powers are routinely abused, by all governments. Prime ministers bypass parliament, governing through special advisers like Dominic Cummings. When they make catastrophic mistakes, they have the power to decide whether or not there should be a public inquiry, and, if there should, what its terms and who its chair should be. Its as if a defendant in a criminal trial were allowed to decide whether the trial goes ahead and, if so, what the charges should be and who the judge and jury are.

Even when an investigation does take place, the prime minister can suppress its conclusions, as Johnson has done with the report on Russian interference in the British political system, which remains unpublished. Does it contain details of unlawful donations to the Conservative party? Or of Conservative Friends of Russia, whose launch party was attended by Cummings? A key figure in this group was a man who has subsequently come under suspicion of being a Russian spy. He has been photographed with Johnson, whom he described as a good friend. What was going on? Without parliaments intelligence and security committees report, we can only guess.

The same inordinate powers enabled Johnson to suspend parliament last autumn, until his decision was struck down by the supreme court, and to terminate remote access for MPs this week, preventing many of them from representing us. He is, in effect, a monarch with a five-year term and a council of advisers we call parliament.

The House of Lords is a further defensive ring within this ring. Some of its seats are reserved for hereditary aristocrats. Some are reserved for bishops, making this the worlds only country, other than Iran, in which religious leaders have an automatic right to sit. The rest are grace and favour appointments, keeping power within existing circles. Many of them are granted to major political donors, reinforcing the power of money. In any other country, they would call it corruption.

Despite a vast array of new democratic techniques, pioneered in other countries, there has been a total failure to balance our supposedly representative system with participatory democracy. This failure grants the winning party a scarcely challenged power, on the grounds of presumed consent, to do as it pleases, for five years at a time. Even when public trust and consent collapse, as they have now done amid the coronavirus pandemic, there are no effective channels through which we can affect the decisions government makes.

These formal rings of power are supported by further defences beyond government, such as the print media, most of which is owned by billionaires or multimillionaires living offshore, and the network of opaquely funded thinktanks, that formulate and test the policies later adopted by government. Their personnel circulate in and out of the prime ministers office.

Our political system has the outward appearance of democracy, but it is largely controlled by undemocratic forces. We find ourselves on the wrong side of the portcullis, watching helplessly as crucial decisions are taken about us, without us. If theres one thing the coronavirus fiascos show, its the need for radical change.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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Britain's claims to being a functioning democracy are only skin deep - The Guardian

People living under freely elected governments have been more responsive to lockdown measures

Jun 6th 2020

MANY PEOPLE would look at the covid-19 pandemic and conclude that democracies are bad at tackling infectious diseases. America and the EU had months to prepare after China sounded the alarm in January. Both have subsequently suffered more than 300 confirmed deaths per 1m people. Chinas Communist Party reports an official death rate that is 99% lower, and has trumpeted its apparent success in containing the outbreak domestically.

Yet most data suggest that political freedom can be a tonic against disease. The Economist has analysed epidemics from 1960 to 2019. Though these outbreaks varied in contagiousness and lethality, a clear correlation emerged. Among countries with similar wealth, the lowest death rates tend to be in places where most people can vote in free and fair elections. Other definitions of democracy give similar results.

We cannot replicate this analysis for covid-19 yet, as it is still spreading at different rates around the world. Western democracies were hit early, in big cities with large flows of people from abroad. Daily deaths are now declining in these places but rising in developing countries, which tend to be less connected and more autocratic.

Existing data are also patchy. Countries that do little testing have few official cases. Even among confirmed cases, governments might be tweaking the number of deaths. Countries with a free press, according to Freedom House, a think-tank, have 60 deaths per 1,000 cases on average. Suspiciously, the average in places that lack media freedom is less than half that. A rate of 15 deaths per 1,000 cases is plausible in New Zealand, which has contained the virus, but less so in Russia, which has not.

One consistent measure that is available in most countries, but not China, is Googles index of mobility via smartphone apps. Researchers at Oxford University reckon that, after adjusting for a countrys wealth and other characteristics, democracies saw a 35% larger reduction in movement in response to lockdown policies. The drop in New Zealand, for example, was twice that in autocratic Bahrain.

People who praise China for its handling of covid-19 would do better to look at Taiwan, a neighbouring democracy. China wasted valuable time in December by intimidating doctors who warned of a lethal virus. Taiwan swiftly launched tracing measures in Januaryand has suffered only seven deaths.

Sources: Frey et al. (working paper); Google mobility reports; Boix et al. (2015); Maddison Project; World Bank; Em-Dat; Freedom House; Hale et al. (2020)

This article appeared in the Graphic detail section of the print edition under the headline "Out in the open"

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Out in the open - Democracies contain epidemics most effectively | Graphic detail - The Economist

A week of escalating and violent protest against racial injustice has prompted democracy reform groups to start uniting behind a message that resonates with their own goals.

Responding to the wave of demonstrations against the deaths of black people killed by police, many of these organizations are reaching out to declare unequivocal support for the marchers. But their statements, which grew in volume Monday, are also seeking to connect the furious urgency of the moment to the pursuit of their sometimes more esoteric sounding agenda.

Achieving racial justice and fixing all that's broken with governance and politics are two sides of the same pursuit, they say. Giving all Americans an equal standing is a prerequisite to securing a democracy that works for all voters, but reducing the current imbalance in democratic power is at the same time a prerequisite for giving all voices a chance to be heard.

"Democracy is our common cause. And, we can't have a true democracy when Black and Brown people are denied their rights to justice or victimized by abuse, racial profiling, and police brutality," Common Cause President Karen Hobart Flynn said Monday in an email to supporters of one of the country's original good-governance groups.

To achieve a better democracy, Flynn wrote, "we must acknowledge racism that has been an integral part of this nation's past and present and fight systemic racism wherever we find it, whether it be in our streets, at the ballot box, or in our justice system."

Roughly 1,000 people are shot and killed by police each year. Despite making up only 13 percent of the national population, black Americans are killed at a rate more than twice as high as white people.

"The numbers are disturbingly consistent from year to year," Robert Weissman, the president of another prominent progressive group, Public Citizen, told its supporters. "But they are not a fact of nature. They can change with policy."

The groups run by Flynn and Weissman, and more than 400 other good-government and civil rights organizations, unveiled a letter asking Congress to reform the country's law enforcement agencies. Their recommendations include setting a federal standard to make use of force by officers a last resort, prohibiting racial profiling and developing a national database to track police misconduct.

The manifesto issued Monday did not include any discussion of voting rights or other top items on the democracy reform agenda.

The groups magnified their voices as 140 or more cities from coast to coast prepared for a seventh consecutive night of peaceful demonstrations pockmarked by bursts of theft, vandalism and attacks on police in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police and after President Trump threatened to send in the military to restore order if governors didn't act quickly. He turned up that pressure Tuesday, demanding New York call up the National Guard to stop the "lowlifes and losers."

The reason for the protests is not new, the groups say in the letter, but are a response to decades of violence and racism against black people and "a cry for action to public officials for structural change, writ large."

Issue One, which emphasizes its bipartisan approach to democracy reform, issued those sentiments in its own statement. (The organization operates but is journalistically independent of The Fulcrum.)

"Now more than ever, we need to be able to trust in our democratic system and its institutions," said the group's CEO, Nick Penniman. "Yet, for many, the political system exists to keep powerless people powerless."

American Promise, which advocates almost exclusively for tighter regulation of money in politics, said in a message to supporters that it needs to get better educated on racial injustices so it can continue to pursue a more equitable and representative democracy.

"This is not a 'distraction' from our goal; this is our goal: an America where we do not abuse power to lock out, silence and destroy our fellow Americans," said the group's president, Jeff Clements.

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Democracy reform groups seize time of racial protest to press their cause - The Fulcrum

Hladick is the policy manager at Unite America, which promotes an array of electoral reforms and helps finance other advocacy organizations, and political candidates, with a commitment to cross-partisanship. (It is a donor to The Fulcrum.)

Unprecedented and unforeseen disruptions to democratic processes the coronavirus pandemic is only the most recent and profound require innovative problem-solving. This is especially true of political party conventions, which serve the important role of congregating parties in-person, but are hard to carry out traditionally while practicing social distancing.

Republicans and Democrats in Utah didn't let the spread of Covid-19 delay their conventions at the end of April. Instead, both parties convened their first-ever virtual conventions and then used mobile apps and ranked-choice voting (also referred to as the "instant runoff" system) to award nominations for governor, Congress and state attorney general.

Under Utah's unusual rules, both major parties emphasize a pre-election endorsement process in picking their nominees. Candidates advance directly to the November general election ballot if they receive 60 percent support at a party convention. If no candidate reaches that threshold, the top two face off on the primary ballot. Candidates who choose to forgo the convention process may still get on primary ballots by gathering petition signatures.

This time, ranked-choice voting meant delegates could rank multiple candidates in order of preference on one ballot. Ballots were counted in rounds. When no candidate was ranked first by three-fifths of the delegates, the least popular candidate was eliminated. Whenever the eliminated candidate was a delegate's favorite, the second choice on that ballot was counted in the next round and so on.

The instant runoffs ended when one candidate cleared the 60 percent support threshold, or else the top two finishers were identified.

Valuing the full range of voter preferences is important, especially when there are more than two candidates in the race. Typically during a Utah convention, delegates sit through rounds of voting and counting ballots, which can take hours.

With delegates scattered across the state, using their phones or laptops for ranked-choice voting, the process was simplified and shortened considerably this spring. Candidates' speeches were uploaded to online platforms for delegates to watch, and mobile voting platforms such as Voatz and ElectionBuddy were made available for voting virtually.

Eight GOP contests required multiple rounds of counting, but all preferences were expressed on a single ballot. The most competitive race featured a dozen candidates vying for the nomination in the 1st congressional district. (GOP incumbent Rob Bishop is retiring after 18 years.) No candidate commanded 60 percent support, but 11 rounds of counting produced the two who will now square off in a June 30 primary.

Though most races at the virtual Democratic convention determined a winner after the first round of counting, the contest for the 1st District also yielded a pair of solid finishers now headed to the primary.

This wasn't the first time either party had used so-called RCV, but the all-virtual convention was new. Despite the process change, turnout skyrocketed and set new records for both parties: 93 percent of Republican delegates and 85 percent of Democratic delegates participated.

In a poll of 1,100 delegates by the state GOP, nearly 90 percent said they were very satisfied or satisfied with the online format while 72 percent said they liked the instant runoff better than multiple rounds of repeated voting. More than half said they'd prefer an online convention in the future, or a new hybrid combination of an in-person and online system.

Utah uses ranked-choice voting in other elections, too. A state law, enacted with bipartisan support two years ago, allows municipalities to pilot RCV systems through 2026. Election officials in two cities that experimented last fall said the system saved taxpayers money, contributed to a more positive campaign atmosphere and was received favorably by the electorate.

RCV is gaining significant traction in other local and state elections, and was used in presidential primaries for the first time this year. Combined with voting by mail or early and in-person, Democratic primary turnout doubled in Alaska, Nevada and Wyoming and just about tripled in Kansas.

The alternative election format helped Republicans and Democrats alike to innovate this primary season while keeping candidates and voters safe. In addition to being nonpartisan, it has the added benefit of being a commonsense and effective solution in the middle of a global pandemic.

Balancing health and democracy for the rest of this election year will require continued creativity from party and election officials. Utah proved that RCV is worth being central to the solution.

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How election innovations in Utah protected citizens and their democracy - The Fulcrum

As protests continue to erupt in our cities and the coronavirus persists, a profound soul searching is taking place across our exhausted land. It first seizes us as confusion and anger, underscored with pain and mourning. Then it emerges as an understanding that the path forward cannot look like the one behind us, but it is unclear how to pave the new path. What is clear is that we are all aching to begin anew. It is time for a great reset.

But how does that reset start? Where do we begin rebuilding the nation? How do we include everyone in the process? When a house is collapsing, the first thing to do is shore up the floor joists, upon which everything rests. In our country, those joists are our democracy, the political system by which people have power, and policy is made on their behalf.

Indeed, those joists have been mercilessly hacked at in the last three decades. We have all seen it happen, and much of it has been intentional. The gerrymandering, which carves people, and often communities of color, out of districts so that those in power can continue to hoard it. The overwhelming dominance of money in politics, which hands the policy process to the wealthiest and leaves almost everyone else behind.

The intentional disenfranchisement of black and brown voters through dirty tricks and crafty laws that echo Jim Crow. The autocratic control of both chambers of Congress by the House speaker and the Senate majority leader. The executive branch aggregating power as the legislative branch loses its limbs. The decline of civic learning and the loss of our sense of common purpose as fellow Americans. The creation of two very different narratives about current events through the tribalization of the media.

The result, of course, is the situation we have all come to hate today. It is one marked by gridlock, division, resentment, and legislation crafted by special interests sailing through the legislative process while the public interest drowns in the wake. As hard as it might be to imagine today, there is a venn diagram overlap between certain supporters of President Trump and all those marching in the streets to protest on behalf of Black Lives Matter, a political system that keeps powerless people powerless.

Unless our leaders begin the process of reconstructing and reinventing that political system, we should not expect anything to fundamentally change in the coming years. That is why democracy reform is the most important precondition for national progress at this point in history.

Reverend William Barber, one of the great civil rights leaders of our time, spoke of the death of George Floyd over the weekend. Barber addressed not just the direct physical violence that had killed him, and kills so many like him every year, but also the violence of policy that undermines poor communities across the nation every day. They face a lack of health care, decent incomes, and affordable housing. Unless we fix the violence of policy, Barber said, then we will continue to be a divided and a deadly and a distorted society. Unless we fix the violence that has been done to our democracy, the violence of bad policies will not end.

About a year ago, the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was asked what it will take to rebuild the middle class in the country. He said, If we are going to actually achieve the kinds of changes that we need, we are going to have better politics. A concern which I raise is that we have been engaged in processes which entail disenfranchisement, weakening the power of ordinary individuals in the political process, both through gerrymandering and through the power of money, and then weakening some of those systems of checks and balances.

What makes our nation great is, in large part, our grand experiment in government by the people. Getting that experiment right in a way that brings all to the table is the first step on the path to national recovery. It requires the passage of laws that strengthen voting rights, reduce the influence of political money on the policy process, end gerrymandering, and rebuild the institution of Congress. Skipping such an important step means we are bound to stumble with the subsequent ones.

The repercussion of stumbling again could be as high as the cost of losing our country to the darkest undercurrents of human history. But if we can muster the strength and the camaraderie to apply ourselves to the task of reforming and reinventing our democracy, we will have the tools needed as a people to begin fixing the many other problems we face.

Nick Penniman is the founder and chief executive officer of Issue One.

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America has to rebuild democracy amid recovery from national crisis | TheHill - The Hill