AMERICA HAS 50 STATES AND 50 SETS OF RULES FOR VOTING
Archaic system in terribly divided nation is a recipe for controversy on election day
In what kind of country do judges decide voting rules only days before a national election?
It's the United States of America, and its very name explains much of the electoral conflict down south.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled three times in recent days on vote-count controversies in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
From a Canadian perspective, it's absurd.
The conflicts, potentially crucial in Tuesday's presidential election, stem from the absolute authority of state governments to conduct all elections, including national ones.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch set the general tone when he wrote: “The Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”
That's the convention enshrined in both the U.S. Constitution and the 10th Amendment of 1791.
In 2020, the system is incredibly archaic, divisive and wide open for political manipulation and suppression of voting rights, a particular specialty of the Republicans.
“The decentralization of election rules in the U.S. is pretty much unique,” says Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt.
“Not just state by state but often county by county. There's no equivalent with elections in Canada.”
“Everybody running in the U.S. has to be elected on a party ticket, whether it's a mayor, or a judge, or those determining boundaries for elections,” he says.
“In Canada, we're able to adjust our boundaries with non-partisan commissions, whereas in the States it's become a weapon for the people in charge at that moment in time.”
Bratt feels the real trouble began in 2000, when the Florida attorney general, who worked for George W. Bush's brother, Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, was in control of the rules that decided the virtually tied state vote.
The Republican-dominated Florida legislature even exercised its power — equally bizarre in a modern democracy — to appoint electoral college delegates supporting Bush.
“That seemed to be a one-off,” says Bratt, “but now everything is so partisan.” And even more open to abuse, given the incredibly complex jumble of voting systems and standards.
Each of the 50 states has its own election rules and voting systems for presidential, senatorial and House of Representative elections.
In practice, it's even more complicated because ballots often come from individual counties within the states.
And so, at this moment in the U.S., literally hundreds of authorities are issuing unique ballots and counting the results in their own ways for Tuesday's election.
The presidential candidates will be at the top of ballots. Next come choices for senators and House representatives.
Down below come party candidates for everything from state senator to county commissioner, sheriff, school superintendent, county attorney, etc.
This is familiar to more than 600,000 dual citizens who live in Canada and routinely vote in U.S. elections. To the rest of us, it looks incredibly alien.
Our national election rules are administered by Elections Canada. Federal elections routinely pass with plenty of political heat but no controversy about the voting process itself.
It's pretty reasonable, after all, to have genuinely national elections in a country with the second-largest land mass on earth. Anything else would surely lead to electoral chaos.
The provinces run their own elections, but these are remarkably uniform across the country, conforming in most ways to federal norms and procedures.
Provincial and federal elections are completely separate, with no overlap at all.
We vote for one person who is running for a party to be an MP or MLA. The leader of the party with the most winners gets to be prime minister or premier.
Very rarely, there might be an issue referendum on a provincial ballot. Some will be coming to Alberta with UCP legislation now in the works.
But that's about as complicated as it gets in Canada.
Bratt is right on point when he says the state-run U.S. system can work as long as politicians recognize the difference between what they can do and what they should do.
In America at this moment, however, it's all partisan manipulation that destroys public faith in the system. President Donald Trump himself discredits democracy nearly every day in his own interests.
But the root problem goes back 250 years. Tuesday night won't change that.
Decentralization of election rules in the U.S. is pretty much unique.