Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state of Arizona had the right to adopt laws, disqualifying votes cast in the wrong precinct and prohibiting organizations from bringing ballots from voters to polling places, that were transparently designed to place hurdles in the path of Democrats seeking to vote. Since most of the United States’ Republican-dominated states have already passed or are now seeking to pass similar or yet more restrictive rules, the United States may soon become the world’s only established democracy where members of one party have managed to make it much harder for members of the other party to cast a ballot. Republicans do not want democracy to operate; it’s possible they’ll succeed.
When it comes to electoral rules, the United States is an outlier among democracies. Freedom House ranks countries on a scale of 1 to 4 on three electoral metrics: whether elections for heads of state are free and fair, whether legislative elections are free and fair, and whether electoral laws are fairly and impartially administered. Almost all major democracies, and many minor ones—like Jamaica and Romania—get a perfect 12. The United States gets a 10, which puts it in company with Poland, a country that barely qualifies as democratic at all.
