First North Carolina then the USA

[pbmus]

In 2005, in the midst of a career of traveling around the world to help set up elections in some of the most challenging places on earth – Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan and Yemen, among others – my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.

In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

In the just released EIP 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.



http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html

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Republicans are the new nazis

[yallerdawg]

1. When an ideology utilizes God-given moral superiority...

as a political function of governing - as the Islamic State does, the Taliban, and Republicans - there remains no limits to their self-righteous justifications and mind-numbing rationalizations.

Republicans will show up and organize and vote - God told them to.

Which makes it harder for us Democrats - no one tells us what to do!

[pbmus]

2. Love your logic... Makes perfect sense ...when nothing else does in this world.

[Warpy]

3. By next year, they might beat NM as the worst run state in the country

Government here is laughable. We've been sending decent people to Washington, but it's a low population state and what's left over for state and local government is not pretty.

[msongs]

4. the minute trump says I do repubs in congress will start the hate legislation train rolling....

first victims the LGBT community under the guise of because jesus
second victims, voters across the nation via onerous voter suppression laws
third victim, women in ways too numerous to mention in a short post