How they see us: American democracy in crisis
American democracy is facing the “greatest test” of its 244-year history, said Henrique Gomes Batista in O Globo (Brazil). President Donald Trump has made the “unprecedented and unproven accusation” that massive voter fraud robbed him of victory over Joe Biden. Observers in other countries can only gape. Trump clearly lost by more than 4 million votes—how can he be contesting smaller amounts in certain states? And why is there doubt at all? Isn’t there a national electoral commission to oversee the vote? The surprising answer is that the American electoral system is “anachronistic compared with those of other Western democracies.” In most countries, the leader is chosen by simple majority, under a centralized system that administers the vote the same way across the country. The winner is known within hours. But the U.S. has no central system. All 50 states conduct their own elections, and local jurisdictions have the power to skew the race in patently unfair ways, such as removing ballot boxes from certain neighborhoods. Most shocking is that not every vote has equal weight, thanks to the Electoral College, which awards proportionally more electors to small states.
Democracy in the U.S. “is broken,” said Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times (Ireland). The U.S. system of governance was set up in the 18th century to exclude women, black people, and Native Americans from the franchise. The right to vote only truly became universal with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and “that act was gutted in 2013 by a Republican-dominated Supreme
Court.” The result is a system in which “the minority can take power against the wishes of the majority,” as with Trump’s own 2016 win. Americans love to pretend “that the world is looking on jealously at the wonderful workings of the perfect system bequeathed to the chosen people of the U.S. by the flawless Founding Fathers.” In fact, everyone can see that the U.S. system “invites and facilitates its own subversion.”
Trump’s refusal to concede delights the Kremlin, said Alexey Kovalev in Meduza.io (Russia). The U.S. president’s allegations of fraud are entirely without merit, of course, but in Moscow they are being treated seriously. Russian state TV has been “animatedly discussing” American hypocrisy. News anchors have reported how the nation that loves to lecture Russia on democracy is now arguing over “ballot stuffing, shenanigans, and dead people voting”—the very stuff that plagues Russian elections. Top anchor Dmitri Kiselyov crowed that American elections are “so sloppy” that foreign interference is not needed to “undermine the will of the people.”
Trump once described Nigeria as a “shithole” country, said Bayo Akinloye in This Day (Nigeria), a nation whose people were too backward to be allowed to immigrate to America. Now, after a “humiliating defeat” in his re-election bid, he “continues to whine about voter fraud,” dragging out the presidential transition and turning the U.S. into an international laughingstock. Nigerians can well ask Trump: “Who is now in a shithole?”