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6 - Election Administration and Democratic Fragility in the US

from Part I - Institutional Dimensions of Democratic Backsliding and Resilience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2025

Valerie J. Bunce
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Thomas B. Pepinsky
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Rachel Beatty Riedl
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Kenneth M. Roberts
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

Free and fair elections have come under increasing threat in the United States. Two critical dimensions are identified to this threat: challenges to ballot access, and challenges to the integrity of the administration of elections. The first has been a long-standing feature of US politics, characterized in recent years by voter identification laws, restrictive registration processes, and rules and procedures that impose unequal burdens on voters. Challenges to election administration are more recent, and threaten to undermine decades of administrative improvements. This chapter provides a snapshot of the threat to election administration, assessing the degree to which state legislative attention is a response to pandemic-era changes or an effort to concentrate election authority in partisan officials. A new data set is presented on election reform legislation in the states in the eighteen months following the election of 2020. While reporting considerable variation across states, it is found  that partisanship, electoral competition, and a declining proportion of the non-Hispanic white population drive efforts to undermine elections’ integrity, expressions of a dangerously polarizing and potentially antidemocratic dynamic in US electoral politics.

Type
Chapter
Information
Global Challenges to Democracy
Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding, Autocracy, and Resilience
, pp. 118 - 140
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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