America After the election

By Dmitry Medvedev, who served as Russia’s President from 2008 to 2012 and Prime Minister from 2012 to 2020. He has been Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation since January 2020.

It is commonly acknowledged that the biggest economies have a major influence on political and social development of other countries.

That they periodically go through affect the global economy and consequently have impact on regional and national economies, as well as on political systems of countries that are sensitive to such impact. Yet, it is often overlooked that certain political events, such as elections, can also provoke serious crises in other countries. That is especially so when countries that have a direct influence on the fundamental global processes are concerned.

In this context, it is worth taking a look at the recent US presidential election. It is not that this presidential campaign, likely the most scandal-ridden in history, proved that the flaws in the US electoral system have a comprehensive nature. That is no news.

In fact, the strengths and shortcomings of the US voting system could be regarded as a purely domestic issue. But there is one problem. Elections in this country, especially when there is a transfer of power from one political force to the other, can trigger significant changes in the global economic development, seriously affecting the existing institutions of international law and global security system.

Many US leaders have at various times admitted, including to me personally, “It is true that our system is not perfect, but we are used to it and it is convenient for us.” The problem is that the rest of the world finds it increasingly “inconvenient” to work with such a country, as the US becomes an unpredictable partner. This unpredictability gives other states, regional associations and military political organizations cause for concern. It would be nice if the US political establishment realized this responsibility.

Let us take a closer look. At first, everything seems quite presentable: alternative candidates, primary elections, and live TV debates. But this is a façade, a nice stage set which determines the spectacularity of the event and, naturally, the preferences of the voters. In the US electoral system, a candidate who wins a relative majority in a particular state – even by a slight margin – almost always gets all the electoral votes for that state. Therefore, in traditionally liberal or conservative states, votes cast by those who support the other party virtually disappear, being reduced to zero. As far as recent history is concerned, Democratic nominees Albert Gore (2000) and Hillary Clinton (2016) lost the election, despite having won the most votes.

Since the existing system awards all the electoral votes to the winner, a candidate who won by a small margin in states with a total of 271 electoral votes may win an election, despite having lost by a landslide in other states. In theory, even a candidate who won the popular vote by more than 100 million ballots may still lose the election in the electoral vote.

On top of that, there is another significant shortcoming in the Electoral College system, where an elector has a right to cast their vote – sometimes without any serious consequences – for someone other than the candidate they have pledged to represent in accordance with the will of the voters. Instances of faithless voting by electors have occurred with regular frequency. For example, in 2016 two Texas electors refused to cast their vote for Donald Trump, although such incidents have never changed the outcome of a presidential election. Now, pending the official results of the election, the winner-take-all principle – rather fairly – has come under a new wave of criticism. Even Hillary Clinton, who ran against Donald Trump in the 2016 election, has called for abolishing the Electoral College and selecting a president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office. Otherwise, there is a difficult situation where tens of millions of voters do not believe that the outcome of the election reflects the actual will of the people.

Moreover, the US citizens themselves have called into question their country’s conformity with the main criterion of democracy – the ability of the state to ensure fair and transparent expression of the people’s will in general.

This is an urgent issue the United States has to deal with. The nation is divided, the fault line running between people of different value orientations, which reflect on the electoral choice between Republicans and Democrats. There is a clear “value divide” between conservative Americans and those who promote change in traditionalist attitudes, between “law-abiding” Americans and those who support active street protest, between those employed in high-tech industry and those left out of the technological revolution. Besides, the election race laid bare the tensions between the federal government and state and local governments. Accusations against the federal government of exceeding its authority in using force to suppress riots have exposed cracks in American federalism, which the central government (regardless of party affiliation) prefers to conceal as far as possible.

There have also been large-scale violations of the election law. The United States still has no standard procedures for voter registration, voter identification, ballot issuance and submission. According to the nonprofit organization Judicial Watch, by September 2020, 29 out of 37 states had 1.8 million more registered voters than actual eligible voting-age citizens. This is largely due to the fact that there is no such concept as a domestic passport or some kind of residence registration in the US, so when shifting their place of residence, people often fail to remove themselves from the voter list. In addition, there were occasions of people who had long since died having voted for one of the candidates. However, courts found no evidence that such cases had been widespread – they were often down to the fact that other family members have similar names, which led to errors in the voter records. Statistics show that there were 153 million registered voters in the US in 2018, with more than 20 million entries in the voter rolls being out of date. According to the California Globe, an NGO, there were nearly half a million such entries in California alone in 2020. In this context, a large-scale campaign was launched urging voters to update their data in the voter lists.

The most acute situation arose as a result of the mass postal voting, which brought Joe Biden a reported majority during the counting of ballots. It is not even that Democrats created a controversial opportunity to gain votes from a passive part of their electorate, using the pandemic as an excuse. They encouraged a more active use of the mail-in voting procedure, which had been widely used only in some states during previous campaigns. According to Donald Trump, this paved the way to uncontrolled machinations. Thus, on the eve of voting day, the Democratic Party allegedly attempted to change the procedure for counting postal ballots in the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, North Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Alabama in order to considerably lengthen the period of their acceptance. This made it possible to relax the monitoring requirements for vote-counting. Consequently, once the voting was over, the Republicans almost immediately announced that they were filing lawsuits in connection with violations registered in 40 states. Lawyers representing the Republicans found it unsound that so many states had continued to count the votes for several days after voting day. They had some serious questions as to the legitimacy of accepting the late ballots. Nevertheless, courts rejected most of the filed lawsuits even in Republican states.

All of this is hardly consistent with those norms of democracy that Washington arrogantly imposes on other countries. For instance, US officials in the OSCE constantly point to the need for the OSCE participating states to comply with the recommendations by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) drawn up based on the results of its election observation activities. In the meantime, the US itself fails to act on the relevant recommendations, blatantly violating the provisions of para. 8 of the 1990 Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE and para. 25 of the 1999 Charter for European Security stipulating the obligation to invite observers for monitoring national elections.

Since 2002, the ODIHR election observation missions in the US have recommended in their final reports that international observers be provided with access to all states at the federal level. However, that is not what we see in reality. Besides, the archaic US electoral system is such that the US federal government has no powers to establish procedures even for federal elections as this is the prerogative of the states. Just as when America was a farmers’ republic with a population of 3.5 million, the president is still elected by the states, which inform the Congress of their decisions through the electoral college.

During the popular vote in 2016, the ODIHR did not have access to polling stations in 17 states. The international observers, who showed legitimate interest in the elections on the voting day, faced threats of arrest and indictment. In the 2020 popular vote, the number of “inhospitable” states reached 18. Only five states and the District of Columbia have legal provisions in place ensuring international election observation. In all other states, it remains at the discretion of the local authorities and is quite unpopular.

The lengthy disputes over the election results in courts (and, at the end of the day, electing a new president there) is yet another fact demonstrating how inefficient and outdated this voting system is. In the 2000 campaign, the votes cast for George W. Bush and his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, in Florida were recounted multiple times. It was the Supreme Court that had the last word, ruling that the vote recounting should stop, which meant the victory of George W. Bush – even though many Americans still doubt the validity of that decision. But at the time, such a timely consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats was exactly what was needed to quickly stabilize the situation.

The enormous costs associated with such a voting system have by now practically erased the word “consensus” from the vocabulary of the American political elite. Just recently, no one could imagine – not even in their worst nightmares – that all these partisan differences would lead to the storming of the Capitol, whose first foundation stone was laid by the first US president, George Washington. The attack carried out by pro-Trump protesters while the Congress was counting votes not only appalled national governments all over the world but provoked bloodshed in the country, which was only recently seen by many as the gold standard of democracy. It was hard to believe that the events resembling so much Ukraine’s Maidan and other color revolutions that unfolded in recent years across a wide range of countries, including those in the post-Soviet space, were broadcasted live from the United States all over the world.

The techniques previously used by Washington for democratization of other countries backfired. The cold civil war that had been raging in the US for a few months reached its climax. And while the world is condemning the attack on the Capitol, anxiously waiting for what is to come next, it is as yet unclear how the Republicans and the Democrats are supposed to find common ground. The social polarization keeps growing. The long-forgotten spirit of McCarthyism is again felt in the air. And there is no one who could answer the question: are there a person and a timeless value that could unite the nation. The situation that has been brought about by a chain of events predetermined by the archaic voting system can lead to new waves of violence and unrest. On the other hand, the American political system has proved its flexibility over the course of centuries. I am sure this time it will cope, too.