Regular presidential elections should have taken place in Ukraine this month.

The post In Ukraine, No Election Doesn’t Mean the Electorate Is Happy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why is this the first you’re hearing of this election? Because the only Californians who can vote in the election are Sikhs. The proposed independent country would be in Punjab, a state in northern India.

But that’s no reason to overlook what might be the most important election in the Golden State next year.

Indeed, the Khalistan referendum, as this ballot measure is known, is worthy of your attention for two reasons.

First, the referendum raises the questions of whether democracy is more likely to quell, or inflame, violence, and how well it might resolve deep divisions over nationhood. Second, the vote is part of an ongoing experiment in how ballot measures, like those commonplace in California, might shape a new global system of democracy.

The Khalistan referendum was proposed by Sikhs for Justice, a U.S.-based group that connects the Sikh diaspora. Sikhism is a 500-plus-year-old religion, fusing elements of Hinduism, Islam and other faiths, and founded by a mystic who believed God transcends religious differences. There are an estimated 25 million Sikhs worldwide, approximately 80 percent of whom reside in India, primarily in the state of Punjab. California is home to more than 250,000 Sikhs, most of whom live in the Central Valley or the Bay Area.

The referendum’s supporters argue that Sikhs, as targets of discrimination and violence in India and elsewhere, need the protection of an independent Sikh-majority nation, which they would call Khalistan.

But India has opposed the referendum, banning Sikhs for Justice in 2019 for “espousing secessionism” and labeling some referendum supporters as terrorists.

These claims are grounded in a longstanding violent conflict between the government and pro-independence armed insurgents. In June 1984, in pursuit of Khalistani separatists, the Indian Army seized Sikhism’s holiest shrine. The number of people killed in the operation is disputed—the government says hundreds, while Sikh groups say thousands.

In October of that year, two of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s bodyguards, who were Sikh, assassinated her. Her death inspired anti-Sikh riots that killed thousands of Sikhs and Sikh leaders, which in turn triggered violence by the Khalistan insurgency, including the bombing of an Air India jet taking off from Montreal in 1985. Over the next decade, some 30,000 people lost their lives in India’s worst religious violence since the 1947 partition. The violence mostly faded away, but the Punjab was never resolved. More recent disputes between the Indian government and Sikh farmers over agricultural policy have revived interest in Khalistan independence, in the Punjab and among the Sikh diaspora.

The Indian government says the referendum could inflame violence. But its Sikh backers say that, to the contrary, the referendum is a democratic tool designed to find a peaceful resolution of longstanding conflict in Punjab, as provided for in the United Nations Charter, which grants all peoples the right to self-determination through referendum.

Referenda on independence have become more common since World War II, though they rarely produce new countries. Perhaps the best-known examples are the multiple referenda in Puerto Rico in and the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.

Scholar of referenda Matt Qvortrup in his book I Want to Break Free: A Practical Guide to Making a New Country wrote that “From a purely rational perspective, many of these referendums seem pointless, as they unlikely result in the formation of a new State. However, from a symbolic perspective, the very vote itself helps to create unity and is a part of a mental state formation process.”

The Khalistan referendum is a global election, held on different dates and in different world cities that are home to many Sikhs. The January 28 balloting, which will take place in San Francisco, follows votes in London (2021); in Geneva, Switzerland (2021); in Brescia and Aprilia, Italy (2022); in Melbourne, Australia (2023); in two cities near Toronto, Brampton (2022) and Mississauga (2023); and in the Vancouver area (twice this fall).  They may also hold referenda in Malaysia and East Africa, which also have large Sikh diaspora communities.

The referendum itself is non-binding—even if the majority of voters favor independence, it won’t guarantee a new nation. But if the results show widespread support for independence among the diaspora, organizers plan to hold a Khalistan referendum in Punjab itself in 2025. They hope that a vote for independence there could bring international pressure on India to recognize Khalistan.

To convince the world of the referendum’s legitimacy, Sikhs for Justice does not oversee the balloting. Instead, an independent international committee, including some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of direct democracy, sets referendum rules and observes and administers the voting.

The Khalistan referendum ballot. Courtesy of author.

The committee is neutral on the referendum question of an independent Khalistan. But many members have a longstanding interest in trying to devise truly worldwide elections so that people in every country can jointly decide policies on global issues, like climate change. Some members are advising an effort to develop a “World Citizens” ballot initiative, to be administered by the U.N.

I know several committee members, through a global direct democracy forum I ran for the last 15 years. The committee’s chair is Dane Waters, a U.S.-born, Beirut-based democracy practitioner and animal rights activist, who is the founder and chair of the Initiative & Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. I embedded with Waters at the most recent Khalistan referendum vote, in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, British Columbia on October 29.

The atmosphere was tense. The Surrey-based Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was an organizer of the referendum, had been assassinated in June. The killing created high-level conflict between India and Canada, whose government says it has credible evidence tying the assassination to India’s government.

More recently, U.S. prosecutors filed charges against a man hired by an Indian government employee to assassinate a referendum organizer, who is an American citizen, in New York this year.

Nijjar’s death had a direct impact on the referendum. Waters and the international committee prefer to hold votes at neutral sites and had rented space at a Surrey public school. But after the Canadian government’s announcement that India was behind the Nijjar assassination, the school and others refused to host, citing security concerns.

The vote was instead conducted in the campus around Surrey’s gurudwara or Sikh temple, steps from where Nijjar was shot and killed. A large detail of Surrey local police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided security.

I attended the second day of referendum voting in Surrey; on the first, September 10, lines were so long that some voters had been turned away. Turnout was also strong for this second vote. At 6 a.m., more than 100 people had lined up, in 30-degree weather, for an election that wouldn’t begin until 9. Outside the voting hall, Khalistan supporters played Punjabi music so loudly that it was hard for me to interview voters waiting in lines that stretched 100 yards out onto a sidewalk.

Inside, however, the event was a quiet and business-like operation, familiar to anyone who has voted in Western elections. Poll workers from British Columbia elections— all non-Sikhs—had been hired through a third party to conduct the referendum. At each check-in table, one of the paid poll workers was paired with a Punjabi-speaking Sikh volunteer, almost all women, who could translate for voters less comfortable in English.

Any Sikh, or anyone married to a Sikh, could register and vote with a photo ID. Poll workers checked names against previous voting rolls to avoid double-voting. People moved through registration, and private voting booths, before exiting into a small festival with tables of Punjabi food, and coffee and donuts from Tim Horton’s, a Canadian institution.

Tens of thousands of people cast ballots. In my conversations about their reasons for voting, older voters recalled violence they or loved ones had suffered in Punjab. Younger, Canadian-born Sikh voters often were more likely to say they were participating because of the discriminatory treatment of Sikh farmers under 2020 agricultural laws (which sparked a farmers’ strike and a retreat by the Indian government). Some mentioned the Gaza war; far better, voters said, to resolve disputes over nationhood through a democratic referendum than through violence.

Could the Khalistan referendum become a model for deciding whether breakaway provinces or secession-minded states can leave and form their own nation? That remains to be seen. But it seems fitting that California, which sometimes dreams of secession, is the next site for this glimpse into the democratic future.

The post Why A Vote on Establishing an Independent Sikh State in Punjab Is Coming to California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On December 9, 100 B.C., Romans assembled to vote for the two consuls who would serve as the Republic’s top magistrates for the coming year. The election promised to be momentous. Gaius Marius, the dominant political figure in the Roman Republic for the previous decade, was finishing his fifth consecutive consulship. Once an extraordinarily popular figure, Marius had only won his most recent consular term through widespread vote-buying and intimidation.

Marius’s behavior in office had been even worse than his campaign conduct. In alliance with two radical populists, the tribune Saturninus and the praetor Glaucia, Marius spent much of the year before the election mobilizing angry crowds that violently backed laws that benefitted their partisans and punished their rivals—in one case even beating their opponents with clubs after polling had begun. So Rome seemed ready to move on.

Marius was not on the ballot that day, but Glaucia was. Glaucia understood that an electoral victory might again depend upon violence and intimidation, and so his supporters came to the polling place, hoping he would win but ready to fight if that would prevent his loss.

Roman magistrates did not win election by simply carrying a majority of the popular vote. Roman elections for consul were instead decided when candidates won a majority of Rome’s 193 voting centuries. The voting centuries were neither equally distributed across property classes nor were they the same size. The wealthiest Romans had the most centuries in the assembly, but their centuries had far fewer members than the ones to which poorer Romans belonged. Romans nevertheless accepted that a successful consular candidate needed to win the support of 97 centuries, regardless of their raw vote total. This was, in a way, a Roman analog to our own Electoral College.

Also, as in 21st-century America, there was a ceremonial aspect to how Romans announced voting results. Each century announced its vote separately, one at a time, until the votes of 97 agreed. And, as the votes were cast on that December day, it became clear that Glaucia would lose the consulship to a man named Memmius. Rather than accept this outcome, he and his supporters rioted. They disrupted the vote counting, attacked Memmius, and beat him to death. The assembled voters fled in terror before the election could conclude.

The Roman historian Appian wrote that “neither laws nor any sense of shame” remained among Romans after the bloodshed began. Supporters of Glaucia battled in the streets with their rivals, before retreating, along with Glaucia and Saturninus themselves, to the Capitoline Hill, the ceremonial center of Rome’s Republic and the place from which our Capitol building derives its name. The insurrectionists then seized the Capitol and barricaded themselves on it.

The Roman Senate invoked a constitutional measure called the senatus consultum ultimum, a rare emergency action that empowered magistrates of the republic to use whatever means they had at their disposal to save Rome’s representative democracy. This time, the person the Senate chose to put down Glaucia’s seizure of the Capitol was none other than Glaucia’s associate, Marius.

Marius faced a wrenching decision. Much of what he had accomplished during the past year came from his deft use of populist rhetoric and political intimidation to excite a base he shared with Glaucia. Marius had looked the other way when Glaucia and Saturninus used mob violence to push Marius’s policy goals and punish Marius’s political adversaries. The senatus consultum ultimum meant that Marius could no longer pretend not to see Glaucia’s abuses. He had to act—or face charges that he was complicit in Glaucia’s insurrection.

Appian tells us that Marius “was vexed” about whether to defend his old ally or defend his state, but he ultimately chose to defend the Republic. He “armed some of his men reluctantly,” approached the Capitol with his troops, and surrounded the hill until the water supply was cut, forcing Glaucia and his men to evacuate.

But that didn’t end the crisis—it only relocated it. Marius, hoping for peaceful trials of his allies, granted Glaucia and his men safe passage down from the hill to the curia, the building where the Roman senate often met. Once Glaucia and his supporters reached the curia, though, an angry mob appeared and set upon the insurrectionists—killing them with a barrage of tiles broken off of the chamber’s roof.

No Roman woke up that December day imagining that the election to choose one of Rome’s top magistrates would end with one candidate killed during the voting and another dying with his supporters in the Senate House. Romans worried constantly about their lawful Republic descending into anarchic violence, but none imagined that this descent would happen so quickly or with such terrible results.

Americans today face a similar moment of shock, and reckoning. On a day when our Congress was supposed to perform the ceremonial task of accepting the electoral votes for our next president, this democratic exercise was halted by violence. Like Glaucia’s mob in 100 B.C., the Washington insurrectionists were incited by the candidate who was about to officially lose the election. With his encouragement, they marched to the Capitol carrying weapons and bombs, stormed through its gates, and interrupted the vote tallying. They were met with gunfire. At least one was killed.

Donald Trump could not even muster the integrity that Marius showed. Instead, Trump expressed love for his supporters, and offered only the most lukewarm criticism of their actions.

It is hard to overstate the damage that a day like this can cause to a republic. The violent disruption of the consular vote in 100 B.C. initiated two decades of political dysfunction that led to the first civil war in Rome’s recorded history. That fighting ultimately deprived hundreds of thousands of Romans of their lives or property.

That’s why Americans must not dismiss, or move quickly past, the events of January 6, 2021. Our leaders and regular citizens must respond far more forcefully to an assault that targeted not just the seat of government, but the democratic rights and protections we enjoy. We need to condemn more clearly the insurrectionists’ actions, to identify and punish all the perpetrators, and to remove the instigators from our public life. If we cannot do that, sedition, insurrection, and political violence threaten to become the most potent political tools in the America of the 2020s—just as they did in the Rome of the 90s B.C.

The post When a Violent Mob Stormed Rome’s Capitol appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To understand how polarization harms parties, consider its most direct effects. As a party’s size and base shrink, so does the diversity of its membership. Consider the situation of the two major parties in the United States. Recent Gallup figures show that 43 percent of voters now identify as independent. Meanwhile, Pew surveys show that ideological entrenchment within each party is alienating moderate voters. In effect, the two parties are burning each other’s tents to the ground.

Some critics would celebrate the demise of parties, but revitalizing modern politics requires rejuvenating parties, which remain the best means for organizing voters with common interests. The question is, how can we rebuild parties in a way that ensures better elections and a better government?

Ironically, one potential solution to the party problem would be to combine two political reforms that are often championed as the surest ways to weaken parties: ranked choice voting and the top two election system.

Ranked choice made the news cycle this summer when Maine voters used it for their primary election, while passing a ballot measure to make this system permanent. Ranked choice lets voters rank their preferred candidates in order. Election officials tally voters’ top picks and then, as needed, eliminate the last-place candidates one by one, reallocating their supporters’ votes to their next-preferred choices until a winner is determined.

The other reform is a top two election—a popular version of what is often called an open primary. In this system, all the candidates for an office appear on the same primary ballot, regardless of party. The top two finishers advance to the general election.

Advocates of these reforms often portray top two and ranked choice as ways to weaken political parties that they view as insular, ideological, and ineffective. In response, party leaders have fought ferociously against these reforms. Parties already holding power prefer closed primaries in which only those belonging to the party choose its candidates.

This opposition has a clear logic. Ranked choice and top two give independent voters more voice and give all voters more choice. This makes it harder for party leaders to elect their favored candidates.

As both reforms have been put into place, however, each has produced peculiar results to which we should pay close attention. The top two system can produce undemocratic results when the most popular political party fields many candidates and a minority party runs only two. This has happened in California, for example, when Democratic candidates in strong Democratic districts divided up the primary vote such that only two Republican candidates advanced to the general election. Subsequent turnout in the general election can plummet because majority party members, along with supporters of smaller parties, have no candidate on the ballot.

Ranked choice can also cause problems, particularly when used in combination with an instant runoff. When the top candidate in this system doesn’t win a majority of first-place votes, a runoff process eliminates the lowest-ranked candidate and distributes his/her votes to whoever was listed in second place on their supporters’ ballots. This can produce worrisome results. In 2010, the winner of the Oakland mayoral race flipped in three of six successive tallies, as lower-ranked candidates were dropped. In fact, a 2015 Electoral Studies analysis showed that instant runoff winners routinely fail to win a majority of ballots.

Critics have pointed to these difficulties as reasons for repealing ranked choice and top two. Moreover, critics argue, neither reform has proven a reliable means of empowering political moderates or encouraging political compromise.

A more realistic approach recognizes that changing election rules always involves trial and error. Rather than rejecting these reforms outright, one can look for a way to build on their strengths and shore up their weaknesses. As it turns out, pairing top two with ranked choice might yield a powerful combination—one capable of moderating the excesses of the strongest political parties and broadening their bases of support.

Last month, this idea received the endorsement of two prominent civic organizations. The Independent Voter Project, which backed top two, and FairVote, which advocates broader reforms, announced plans to merge these reforms in California. They envision a “Top Four” primary in which the four highest vote-winners compete in a ranked choice general election.

Ranked choice could curb the defects of an open primary, especially one that selects only two winners. When voters must choose a single candidate, those with narrow support can sneak through to the runoff election over preferred opponents who split each other’s vote. Letting voters name second-, third- and fourth -choice candidates who have similar platforms will produce winners with broader support.

Meanwhile, a top two—or better, a top four—open primary could curb the excesses of ranked choice with instant runoff. Instead of electing people in one sitting, voters would get two rounds of election. That would allow for further consideration of the top candidates, instead of letting the initial rankings of a small primary electorate determine the winner.

The top four concept is particularly appealing. A FairVote analysis shows that top two systems exclude third party and independent candidates more than 90 percent of the time. In the vast majority of cases, the top two system simply advances one candidate from each major party. With four winners, major parties would almost always have a candidate advance—protecting them against lockouts—while minor party candidates would have a greater chance of advancing. This likelihood motivates voters in all parties to cast ballots—both in the primary and general election.

Admittedly, these reforms make voting a bit more complicated, particularly if they’re combined. There’s no denying that it takes more mental effort to rank a few candidates than to pick just one. Dealing with such complexity requires bringing into the mix two more reforms: ballot simplification and voter education.

To simplify the open primaries in this combined system, states and municipalities should leave off the ballot any contest that has four or fewer candidates. In such cases, all the candidates can advance automatically without cluttering voters’ ballots.

In the second round, or general election, every ballot needs to show voters each candidate’s party affiliation, if any, even in open primaries. Party affiliation is a powerful signal for many voters and including it aids voters who may not know or recognize individual candidates. For the same reason, each registered political party should have the right to display on the ballot its endorsements, so long as the candidate accepts. This will result in some candidates having multiple party endorsements, but more information aids voter decision making.

Simplifying life for voters helps, but a higher purpose is making elections more deliberative. The best elections are ones in which voters learn key pieces of information, weigh alternatives, and then make informed choices.

To help busy voters make informed choices, election officials should experiment with new forms of public education. In doing so, however, they face a dilemma. University of Arkansas communication scholar Robert Richards has found that conscientious election officials often struggle to tell voters what they need to know because they fear looking partisan.

Emerging online tools can help address the information deficit. Around the globe, tools such as Vote Compass ask voters to complete surveys, then show which parties (or candidates) best align with voters’ values. Social networking sites, in spite of their hazards, can also help voters get advice from like-minded friends who have taken the time to sort through crowded fields of candidates.

Other educational reforms may be less familiar but have the potential to be tremendously helpful. The state of Oregon, for example, aimed to improve voter education by launching the Citizens’ Initiative Review in 2010. This process convenes a panel of two dozen randomly selected citizens to hear from both sides of a ballot issue, talk with experts, then write a one-page analysis that goes into the state’s voter pamphlet. For example, the inaugural Review explained to voters that “an unintended consequence” of one proposed law “is that juveniles [would be] subject to twenty-five-year mandatory minimum sentences.”

I have long argued that such a citizen-based system could be used not only for ballot measures but for candidates as well. Randomly selected citizen panels could sift through materials provided by candidates to distill the most essential information to place in a voter pamphlet. The panel could ensure the fairness of its process by having equal parts Democrats, Republicans, and others. Final approval of each contest’s candidate summaries would require supermajority support within each of these subgroups.

Putting these reforms together, such a system could result in better candidate pools—but also better long-term results for the major parties. This system ensures that the parties have ample opportunity to remind voters of candidates’ party affiliations and endorsements. Thus, winning the final tally in a ranked choice top four election will usually require belonging to one of the two major political parties.

But, at the same time, successful candidates will need to court independents, or even moderates from the opposing party. Reaching across party lines wins a candidate what might prove to be decisive second-choice or third-choice preference rankings.

These countervailing forces permit the major parties to win elections and widen their bases, but only by recruiting and electing more moderate and capable candidates. Parties with broader bases of support are stronger.

With insufficient data at hand, these concepts remain nothing more than a hypothesis. But uncertainty is not an argument for inaction. If anything, it should inspire experimentation with different reforms—and packages of reforms—to give voters more choices and more information, while making sure winning parties are powerful enough to govern and diverse enough to remain broadly representative.

Ultimately, the goal is for political parties to seek better candidates who enter and win elections, then wear their party badges proudly while enacting good legislation or administrating effectively. In the end, this requires not just one election reform, but many.

The post Here Are Two Voting Reforms That Could Counter America’s Hyperpolarization appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not kidding. Yes, a handful of our fellow Californians—prominent citizens from Samuel L. Jackson and Bryan Cranston to Miley Cyrus and Barbra Streisand—proclaimed themselves so disgusted with the sorry state of American democracy that they pledged to depart the United States after the November elections. And yes, none of them have made actual arrangements for their exile; perhaps their Golden State digs are too swank to flee.

But I do know at least one non-celebrity Californian, whose humble abode is eminently flee-able, who is taking his frustrations with California and American-style democracy overseas. This weekend, in fact, he’s decamping for Europe, where he’ll work to figure out where his country and state are going wrong democracy-wise.

That departing Californian is yours truly.

I must confess: this is not my first such journey. Every couple of years for the past decade, I’ve helped bring together scholars, journalists, activists, election administrators, and politicians who work on participatory democracy, including the initiative and referendum processes for which California is well known. Each gathering is in a different country—South Korea, Uruguay, Tunisia, Switzerland, and even San Francisco. This time our destination is San Sebastián, in Spain’s Basque Country.

I don’t enjoy long-distance travel and would be happy never to go east of the Sierra Nevada. And I don’t particularly enjoy organizing the events, which often requires dealing by Skype and email at odd hours with prickly foreign professors or officials who speak languages I don’t.

But I do it because, by listening to people from around the world explain their challenges, I get a much clearer idea of what’s wrong with our version of democracy, and how we might improve it.

As the French realist Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

I wish every American, every Californian, would do the same—travel outside the country not for business or for tourism but to grasp how other places make democratic decisions, so that we might better comprehend ourselves. Goodness knows that such understanding is lacking; surveys show big majorities of Californians know little about the most basic functions of their state and local governments.

Unfortunately, too many people here consider the very idea of looking for answers overseas as daft, even preposterous. When I give talks to Californians—from leaders to college students—and start describing how other countries tackle ballot initiatives or elections or budgeting in smarter ways than we do, the audience quickly tunes out. The singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow has been receiving fairly dismissive treatment for a petition she’s circulating urging the U.S. to limit the poison of endless electoral politics and adopt a shorter election cycle, like Canada and Great Britain. In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, Crow lamented the discounting of those foreign models:

“Yes, they’re both parliamentary systems. But really? That means we shouldn’t have the conversation about what we can learn and apply in our own system?”

The resistance to foreign ideas is especially strong in Sacramento, where political staffers and lobbyists heap ridicule on those who make such suggestions (I speak from personal experience). And heaven help an elected official who wants to go overseas to learn more about democracy—he or she is all but certain to be pilloried for taking an expensive “junket.”

I find this cynicism dispiriting—and surprising. After all, Californians can be among the most open people in the world when it comes to embracing fashion or design or entertainment or technologies from around the world. But we have the opposite attitude when it comes to democracy and governance. We are convinced that our system is so singularly distinctive that the world has little to say to us.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong we are. Almost nothing in California government is a native invention. We borrowed our two-house legislative system from our British colonial masters, plagiarized our first constitution from Iowans and New Yorkers (and by extension, the Dutch), took our top-two-runoff election system from the French-speaking world, and established our direct democracy system explicitly on the Swiss model. California prides itself on being a leader in social advances like women’s suffrage because we were ahead of nearly all other states. But in truth, we were just following the example of New Zealanders, Aussies, and Swedes when women won the right to vote.

Our reluctance to look overseas for fixes for our many democratic problems makes little sense in the aftermath of this election. Nearly every democratic institution in this country—the presidency, Congress, law enforcement, state election officials, intelligence agencies, the media—took a beating in 2016, and finds its credibility diminished as a result. In California, our first open U.S. Senate seat in a generation produced a desultory race, and we turned direct democracy into a bludgeon, littering ballots with 17 complicated and confusing statewide initiatives (plus as many as 25 additional local measures in some places).

Despite widespread disillusionment with aspects of our democracy, there are few big ideas being advanced for reform. We’re not looking far and wide enough for them, and so our insularity embitters us. As Mark Twain famously noted in The Innocents Abroad:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

In San Sebastián this week, I’m looking forward to learning more from the world: About how Germans support grassroots groups that want to bring ideas to the ballot, how Tunisians are creating a new system of local government, how Seoul, South Korea, and Vienna, Austria have found smarter ways to engage citizens in local questions, and how Basques have built economic and governance structures around cooperatives, instead of the massive conflict-ridden systems we favor in California.

I wish I could transport a plane full of local and state officials overseas with me, so they could compare notes and learn firsthand from their counterparts elsewhere, the way American businesspeople and scholars seem more comfortable doing.

“If I cannot add to my own level of understanding, I could ill afford to try to raise that of others,” said the Basque Country’s own Saint Ignatius of Loyola. In these times of great anxiety and little understanding, leaving the country might be the most patriotic thing you could do.

The post Why We All Need to Leave the Country After This Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Madison was talking about whether America should restrict voting rights to property owners—but he might as well have been debating ballot selfies.

Ever since Americans began carrying smartphones with cameras, we’ve been posting photos of our ballots on social media. The so-called ballot selfie—which is not an actual selfie but typically a photo of a completed ballot—is now nearly as ubiquitous on voting day as those omnipresent stickers. It is how a great many Americans, millennials especially, convey their choice for elected office, share their voting enthusiasm, and implore their friends to follow suit.

And, in at least 25 states, it is illegal.

This widespread criminalization of ballot selfies occurred in state legislatures over many years with relatively little debate; some states simply extended existing bans on voting booth photography to cover the new genre. But the issue shot to prominence in 2014 when New Hampshire began investigating three voters who posted ballot selfies in violation of a state law that bars voters from “taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media or by any other means.” (One voter uploaded a picture of his Republican primary ballot to Facebook with the caption: “Because all of the candidates SUCK, I did a write-in of Akira,” his recently deceased dog.) Facing impending prosecution, the voters fought back in federal court, arguing that the New Hampshire statute violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

In August 2015, the voters won a total victory in a strongly worded opinion by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, a George H.W. Bush appointee. Barbadoro reasoned that the New Hampshire law was a “content-based restriction on speech because it requires regulators to examine the content of the speech to determine whether it includes impermissible subject matter.” And according to the Supreme Court, when a speech regulation “target[s] speech based on its communicative content,” courts must subject it to strict scrutiny—meaning it must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest.

Barbadoro found that the New Hampshire law satisfied neither prong. First, he challenged the state’s argument that the law furthered the “compelling government interest” of preventing vote-buying. New Hampshire hypothesized that vote-buyers might demand ballot selfies to ensure their money was well-spent but could not find an iota of evidence that this method of vote-purchasing actually occurred, making the threat too abstract to satisfy strict scrutiny: “For an interest to be sufficiently compelling,” the judge wrote, “the state must demonstrate that it addresses an actual problem.” Second, Barbadoro found that the law was far too broad to be narrowly tailored. “When content-based speech restrictions target vast amounts of protected political speech in an effort to address a tiny subset of speech that presents a problem,” he wrote, “the speech restriction simply cannot stand if other less restrictive alternatives exist.”

Just two months later, a federal judge in Indiana reached an identical conclusion in striking down that state’s ballot selfie ban. With some alarm, the judge noted that Indiana had criminalized political expression—thereby violating a bedrock principle of the First Amendment—in order to address an apparently nonexistent problem. Since then, New Hampshire has appealed Barbadaro’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The judges’ palpable skepticism at oral arguments in September suggests the state is poised to lose unanimously.

Absent evidence of vote-buying, these ballot selfie bans do seem to be overreactions—possibly well-intentioned regulations that nevertheless foster perilous political censorship. Expressing joy or anger about an election is core political speech—where, the Supreme Court has noted, “the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith.” New Hampshire and 24 other states seek to suppress a mode of communication beloved by young voters with no justification other than abstract concerns over a phantom threat. The ballot selfie may be emphatically modern, but ballot selfie bans look a lot like old-fashioned censorship.

Not every election law expert agrees. Writing in Reuters, Richard Hasen insists that ballot selfies are a “threat to democracy.” Hasen asserts that vote-buying “is a real—not theoretical—problem,” and that banning ballot selfies is a narrowly tailored way to combat it. A ballot photo, he writes, “is unique in being able to prove how someone voted.” Hasen even speculates that the reason vote-buying is so rare is because of laws like New Hampshire’s. Quoting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a decidedly different context, Hasen proclaims that repealing ballot selfie bans because vote-buying doesn’t occur “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

There are three problems with Hasen’s analysis. First, ballot selfies don’t irrefutably “prove how someone voted”; as election law attorney Daniel Horwitz has explained, voters using both paper and electronic ballots could almost always change their votes after snapping a photo. Second, the (still relatively rare) instances of voter fraud to which Hasen alludes likely would not have been foiled by a ballot selfie ban. Vote-buying almost always occurs through mail-in absentee ballots, not at the polls. Yet some ballot selfie bans only proscribe photographs inside the voting booth. And even broadly written bans would surely fail to stop absentee ballot–buying. If you’re selling a ballot that you fill out in the privacy of your home, you could easily prove your vote by other means—like showing it to a vote-buyer in person. (Why would you want to tout your purchased ballot on social media, anyway? That’s the least private way to prove how you voted.)

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Hasen doesn’t seem to recognize the immense value that young voters today place on ballot selfies. Millennials use ballot selfies to convey information about their political views and engage with their friends about elections, to broadcast their personal ideologies, and share excitement about voting. (And they may foster more voting: One study suggests that Facebook users are more likely to vote when their friends reveal on social media that they have voted.) No matter how many states ban them, they will remain pervasive on Election Day, a key mode of political expression for the younger set. At this point, nothing short of a heavy-handed government crackdown can reverse that. The question, then, isn’t whether states should stop ballot selfies, because they can’t. The question is whether states should dangle the threat of prosecution over voters who dare to share a picture of their ballots, chilling speech and stifling political passions.

James Madison never wrote anything about smartphones. But it’s not hard to guess where he would’ve come down on ballot selfie bans. The founding father may have called election regulation “a task of peculiar delicacy,” but his view on free speech was simpler: It shall not be abridged. For better or worse, ballot selfies have become a fundamental mode of political speech in America. The First Amendment is clear here: Let the voters Snapchat.

The post I’ll Vote, But First, Let Me Take A Selfie appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Though seemingly innocuous, in many ways this suggestion is one of Trump’s most dangerous because its intent is not to preserve the sanctity of the voting process: it’s to guarantee a specific result. The miracle of our polling places—and the aspect which must be preserved—is that even though voting is the primary and most basic form of political action, voting precincts are neutral spaces, intended only to facilitate, not mandate, enforce, or guide, the choices voters make.

What’s more, polling places aren’t neutral because of law enforcement or government presence—though the Department of Elections does structure and oversee the process. Instead, voting spaces are kept neutral by other citizens, everyday people who agree to staff precincts. There is a small stipend involved, but given the long hours, money isn’t a huge motivator. Most poll clerks and inspectors are, essentially, volunteers. Other countries—Mexico, for example—compel citizens to staff the polls through a random lottery much like jury duty. The U.S. manages to find thousands of citizens freely willing to sit for hours and facilitate the process.

I signed up to staff my local precinct during the last primary after receiving an email from the San Francisco Department of Elections. I took a test to measure my English fluency and my ability to follow directions. I was interviewed by a woman who discussed my ability to work in teams (I can), my comfort handling disgruntled groups of people (high), and my ability to show up on time (unimpeachable).

Next I was required to attend a three-hour class. Though there was an instructor, training largely relied on a recitation of the Poll Worker Manual, your “ultimate resource,” and 11 videos displaying the same information again, all of which lulled one man in the back into a deep slumber, his head falling farther forward with every video. “The best way to complete your mission is to follow the manual,” our instructor assured us. As I stared at the flimsy, stapled booklet in my lap, my confidence in the voting process—and my ability to uphold it—started to wane.

That confidence all but disappeared when, on California’s primary election day, I found myself alone on the sidewalk at 5:50 am. Though I had only ever voted in large, solemn places—churches and school auditoriums—I was assigned to work in a garage. Recently remodeled, covered in drywall dust, and complete with a washer/dryer and a vintage Centipede arcade game, the space was hardly the bastion of democracy I had anticipated. I stood, baffled, as the garage owner, a man with hair to his waist and toe shoes, came out to open the door.

Soon the other poll workers arrived—two recently graduated high school sweethearts and Ashley, a 28-year-old health care worker who came attached to two emotional support dogs named Buddy and Honey. The sweethearts had prepared for the day by bringing a case of Gatorade and a backpack full of candy. I wanted to believe they were motivated by democratic ideals as romantic as my own, but when asked why they volunteered, the boy explained, “I didn’t want to sit at home all day.” The girl said, “I just wanted to be with him.”

Still, with Buddy and Honey kicking up dust and the four of us pitching in, we managed to assemble our polling place and proclaim the polls open at 7 a.m., just as people started to appear at the door. For the next 16 hours we muddled through. The sweethearts checked people off the roster and helped an elderly man to a chair so he could sit comfortably while marking his ballot. Ashley assisted people with Buddy perched happily on her shoulder. When we thought the Insight Machine had counted a ballot twice—it hadn’t—we reported it. When a voter from L.A. wanted to vote in San Francisco, we called the Voter Assistance Hotline to try and find a way for her to cast a ballot. When we discovered the Department of Elections had not included the requisite signage, we called and it was delivered.

Ashley, the sweethearts, and I were relieved to close the polls at 8 o’clock that night. We carefully counted the ballots we had received and the unmarked ballots that remained. We folded up the voting booths and printed the results from the Insight Machine, signing over the ballots to the Sheriff’s Department. Later, as accusations of irregularities began to swirl around the California Democratic primary, I started to worry. Had we unwittingly done something wrong?

As I reevaluated the experience, I realized it didn’t matter that we weren’t the dignified bearers of democracy I had envisioned: the system had worked. On the day I worked, some 9 million people voted. Many were given provisional ballots, either because they had lost or never received their mail-in ballot or because they didn’t appear on the voter rolls. While some claimed those votes were ignored, the reality is that they were assiduously counted in a thorough process that took weeks to complete. Although they called the primary before every vote was accounted for, officials continued to count the ballots, ensuring that every provisional and mail-in ballot was recognized and that no one voted twice.

Though the national conversation about voting nearly always focuses on the results, that process—that very deliberate act of collecting and counting every ballot long after the results are clear—matters equally. When Donald Trump and others insinuate the process is “rigged,” they aren’t really talking about the process; they’re talking about the outcome. Though it seems contradictory, running a polling place has nothing to do with the results, and everything to do with protecting a fair and open process. The “poll worker mission” is simple and very clear: to protect voter rights, serve voters with respect, and offer assistance. “On Election Day,” my manual instructed, “You will take an oath to perform your duties to the best of your ability.” In a time as politically polarized as this current election cycle, when everyone has an opinion to share, poll workers promise to put aside their political views for a single day and help people cast their ballots.

That willing silence is a radical act and one that continued to startle me long after my fellow poll workers and I had wiped the drywall dust off our backpacks and awkwardly waved goodbye, wandering home to see what the day’s results would be.

The post Take It From a Poll Worker, the System Isn’t Rigged appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the country’s actual national sport may be the political election.

The Philippines has just gone through a campaign season that engaged the whole country to a degree I have not seen before—and made news all over the world. It culminated in electing our new president Rodrigo “Rody” Roa Duterte, a lawyer and former mayor known for outrageous populist rhetoric that has drawn comparisons to what Americans are currently hearing from U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Duterte’s elevation has occasioned worries about the future of the Philippines. But it has also produced great hopes for the future. As a veteran human rights and democracy activist for more than 40 years, I have felt both emotions in these elections and their aftermath.

Elections demonstrate the best and worst of this country. The best is the enthusiasm, the excitement, and the energy of voters who insist on interacting directly with candidates and take seriously the right and responsibility to vote. Media coverage is enormous, with all candidates receiving dedicated TV and radio coverage, befitting the stakes and the intense national interest. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) estimated that 81 percent of the 55.6 million registered voters cast ballots in the most recent elections.

In fact, it’s common to see voters wait four or five hours in a queue before casting a ballot. That wait, though, is part of a problem. For all our affection for elections, the process itself can feel bastardized. Vote buying remains far too accepted a tactic. And our candidates lean on showbiz antics and even political violence. Too many of our politicians are unprepared and unqualified members of elite political families.

Widespread election deception is not only part of the story of the Philippines, but part of my own history working for democracy. In 1969, the controversial re-election of Ferdinand Marcos, in votes marred by massive election cheating, made clear that his presidency was sliding into dictatorship. In 1972, martial law was declared.

By that time, I was part of the anti-Marcos movement fighting the dictatorship. In 1974, I was jailed as a consequence. After being released eight months later from a military camp, I joined a larger movement that exposed Marcos’ violations of human rights to the world. When the dictatorship finally fell in 1986 in the face of a popular uprising, I helped file—and eventually win—a case in Hawaii requiring the exiled Marcos and his family to compensate victims of his human rights violations. The Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, where I’ve worked since the early 1990s, was established to help test and strengthen our country’s burgeoning democracy.

During this election season, as part of my work with the Institute, I traveled throughout the country to talk with people about the elections and the process of putting them on. I visited General Santos City (hometown of the new senator and famed boxer Manny Pacquiao), Cotabato City (where the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front has its headquarters in Camp Darapanan, on the city’s outskirts), Tacloban City (the epicenter of supertyphoon Haiyan destruction), Cebu City (home to the largest concentration of voters in any province), Kiangan in the province of Ifugao (where General Yamashita surrendered the Japanese forces during World War II), and San Fernando, Pampanga (the home province of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo).

Excited and enthusiastic, people I visited with frequently asked for whom they should vote, indicating how seriously they took their civic responsibility. But there was also deep concern about how the elections were conducted, and whether votes were being counted accurately. In places with armed conflict, local authorities drew up detailed plans to deal with the various rebel groups in different parts of the country or with local political warlords who use threats of violence to coerce people to vote for certain candidates.

During these particular campaigns, social media amplified other troubling election byproducts. Unsavory name-calling, uncouth comments, insults, and death threats—which can’t be taken lightly—were all too common as supporters of political opponents battled online.

And yet I’m heartened by the election results. This year, the Philippines’ automated election system allowed for quick counting and tracking of the results. Many voters made a day of the elections, staying at the polls until the transmission of the votes in the evening. The transparency of this system meant that this year’s results were quickly accepted both by losing candidates and by the public at large.

There were still reports of vote-buying, election violence, and cheating. However, these did not materially affect the national results—except in one race, for the tightly contested position of the vice president. In that election, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., the son and namesake of the late dictator, lost to Congresswoman Leni Robredo, the widow of an interior secretary killed in a 2012 plane crash. In an ironic twist, he is crying that he was cheated.

I also view the election of Duterte as a watershed. For the first time, Filipinos have elected a local mayor from a far southern city, a man who was far outside of national political circles. This was part of a larger trend of voters favoring candidates who promise key governance reforms—including federalism and devolution of power to provinces. Elite candidates representing the Philippines’ old guard fared less well.

For all the international media’s fixation on his strongman bluster, Duterte has a genuine mandate from the people and there is no challenge to his victory. And that in itself represents an opportunity. Duterte has said his top priority will be changing the country’s charter so that it strengthens local governments and grassroots politics. This focus on local governance is a departure from the practice of national leaders augmenting their own power.

Whether Duterte will take on corruption—and fraudulent elections themselves—is harder to say. He has promised to advise and dialogue with political enemies. Perhaps the strengthening of local governments will strengthen democratic institutions, particularly if our new president fulfills his promise to include all people, including rebel forces, in his reforms.

And if he doesn’t? There will be elections again, and the people of the Philippines will be there, in very large numbers.

The post The Philippines Election was Corrupt—and a Victory for Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But what is populism, anyway? There is no easy answer, for “populism” describes a political style more than a specific set of ideas or policies, and most commentators apply it to others instead of themselves. Our textbooks usually associate populism with the People’s Party of the 1890s, but a little probing shows that the style has deeper roots than the “free silver” campaigns associated with William Jennings Bryan. Populism refers to political movements that see the great mass of hard-working ordinary people in conflict with a powerful, parasitic few, variously described as “special interests,” the “elite,” the “so-called experts,” and of course, the “establishment.” Populists often insist that plain common sense is a better source of wisdom than elite qualities like advanced education, special training, experience, or a privileged background. Populist movements can be choosy, however, in how they define the “people,” and have frequently excluded women, the very poor, or racial and ethnic minorities. Over time, movements labeled “populist” may have targeted the marginalized about as often as they have the elite, sometimes perceiving an alliance between the idle rich and the undeserving poor at the expense of folks in the middle.

Early populist notions appeared in the rhetoric of 18th-century English radicals who warned of an eternal struggle between liberty, virtue, and the common good against corrupt and tyrannical courtiers. Their ideas spread and evolved in the American Revolution, as the “war for home rule” became a “war over who should rule at home.” An anonymous writer captured the early populist vision in a 1776 pamphlet from New Hampshire entitled “The People the Best Governors,” and many others echoed him. “The people know their own wants and necessities and therefore are best able to rule themselves,” he declared, because “God… made every man equal to his neighbor.” In the opposite corner, many of the founders worried about unchecked popular power and placed numerous curbs on popular power in the Constitution, including the Electoral College, a Senate chosen by state legislatures, and lifetime seats for federal judges.

Despite early stirrings, it was the presidential campaigns of Gen. Andrew Jackson that made the populist style a major force in national politics. To many voters, the presidential candidates of 1824 were a lackluster, squabbling batch of what we’d today call Washington insiders. Known as “Old Hickory,” Jackson was the exception—the humble boy veteran of the Revolution and heroic victor at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, who had proved his mettle and virtue against the British and Indians alike. Testifying to his military toughness, his popular nickname also evoked his rural roots and common touch. As one admirer put it, Old Hickory “was the noblest tree in the forest.”

Supporters assured voters that the general’s natural talents far outshone the specious, elite distinctions of his chief competitor, John Quincy Adams—the son of a president, raised in royal capitals, who’d been a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Harvard professor, and secretary of state. “Although General Jackson has not been educated at foreign courts and reared on sweetmeats from the tables of kings and princes,” sneered one typical editorial, “we think him nevertheless much better qualified to fill the dignified station of president of the United States than Mr. Adams.” In 1824, when Jackson won an electoral plurality but not a majority, and career politicians elected Adams in the House of Representatives, Jackson’s motto for his successful 1828 rematch was ready-made: “Andrew Jackson and the Will of the People.”

Jackson’s inauguration is one of the grand scenes of American history that everyone seems to know about. The speechmaking and oath-taking were solemn and boring, though one high-society matron remembered that the sight of “a free people, collected in their might, silent and tranquil, restrained solely by a moral power, without a shadow around of military force, was majesty, rising to sublimity, and far surpassing the majesty of Kings and Princes, surrounded with armies and glittering in gold.” The White House reception was far otherwise, at least as Mrs. Margaret Bayard Smith described it. “The Majesty of the People had disappeared,” she shuddered. “A rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling fighting, romping …. The whole [White House] had been inundated by the rabble mob.” Mrs. Smith probably exaggerated, and the melee stemmed more from poor planning than innate barbarism, but she perfectly captured the attitude of America’s “better sort” to the mass of farmers, artisans, tradesmen, and laborers who now had final authority in its government. In theory they were sublime, but civilization trembled when they forgot themselves.

Jackson’s conduct in office made official Washington no happier. Mrs. Smith’s husband was president of the Washington branch of the Bank of the United States (a rough counterpart of today’s Federal Reserve), and eventually lost his job when Jackson attacked it. Many of his friends held high appointments in the Adams administration and rightly worried over Jackson’s policy of “rotation in office.” Proclaiming that no one owned an office for life and that “men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves” for government service, the president began to “reform” the government by replacing experienced Adams men with loyal Jacksonians. His policy evolved into the spoils system, in which politics outweighed other qualifications in filling the civil service.

Jackson’s populism appeared most clearly in his policy toward the banking and transportation corporations that were transforming the American economy at the dawn of industrialization. Corporate charters were valuable privileges distributed by legislatures, and state governments often shared corporate ownership with private investors. Jackson feared that public investments offered unearned advantages to insiders that would surely lead to corruption and as he put it, “destroy the purity of our government.” He quickly stopped the practice at the federal level, cheering his supporters but dismaying promoters of turnpikes and canals.

Jackson went much further in his war on the Bank of the United States. With a charter from Congress, the Bank was a public-private corporation partly funded by the taxpayers but controlled by private investors. Its hold on the nation’s currency gave it immense economic powers, but it faced no democratic oversight. Clearly foreshadowing modern controversies, Jackson was also sure the Bank made dubious loans and campaign contributions to influence politicians and editors and even to buy elections. Jackson vowed to destroy it.

When a bill to renew the Bank’s charter reached Jackson in July 1832, the president issued a slashing veto that bristled with populist attacks sounding quite familiar today. “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” he charged. They sought special favors “to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,” rightly leading “the humbler members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers … to complain of the injustice of their government.” The government should treat the rich and poor alike, but the Bank made “a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.” After the veto, the president withdrew the government’s money from the Bank before its old charter expired, an act his enemies condemned as a flagrant abuse of power that put the country “in the midst of a revolution.”

These moves by Jackson enraged leading businessmen, mobilized Jackson’s own Democratic Party like nothing ever had, and inspired a rival Whig party to oppose it. The parties’ ensuing clashes sent voter participation rates above 80 percent, and kept them high for decades. In his farewell address, President Jackson warned that “the agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes”—populism’s “people,” in other words—“have little or no share in the direction of the great moneyed corporations,” and were always “in danger of losing their fair influence in the government.” That language is strikingly familiar to 2016 ears, as it would have been to populists in the 1890s and New Dealers in the 1930s.

Today, Andrew Jackson is no longer very popular, and many of his values are no longer ours. His vision of the “people” had no room for people of color. Some of his attacks on eastern financial elites were a continuation of the Jeffersonian attacks on urban, nationalist, Hamiltonian principles. Jackson’s populism was thus a Trojan horse for pro-slavery, pro-states rights interests. He was a wealthy slaveholder himself, with no qualms about African-American bondage and deep hostility to abolitionism. He ignored the early movement for women’s rights, and his infamous policy of Indian removal partly stemmed from demands by his “base” for plentiful free land.

Yet Jackson’s legacy is still with us, and not just the racist part. Ask Bernie, the scourge of modern Wall Street. Ask the Donald, whose promise to expel a minority group brings to mind Indian removal. As long as America venerates the Voice of the People, an evolving Jacksonian populism will survive on the left and the right.

The post Donald and Bernie, Meet Andrew Jackson appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Soon he attracts enthusiastic supporters to his cause with his unconventional ideas for transforming the economy. His campaign is portrayed as a revolution, upsetting received wisdom about politics and media. And, despite strong opposition from the party’s establishment, he goes on to win the Democratic nomination.

Is this the future of Bernie Sanders in 2016? No. It’s the past: Upton Sinclair in California’s race for governor in 1934.

The U.S. has had its share of socialist candidates and socialist politicians, but Sinclair’s was among the most consequential. Sinclair’s candidacy is also among the most closely studied. The Campaign of the Century is the title of Greg Mitchell’s now classic book about Sinclair’s run. Mitchell—no relation, alas—showed how the 1934 governor’s race changed politics, opening the door to the national media-driven, consultant-managed campaigns we still have today. This was Sinclair’s inadvertent revolution—and more revolutionary than anything Sanders has done yet.

Sanders is echoing Sinclair’s message: The capitalists have too much power and must be stopped. “Capitalists will not agree to any social progress completely eliminating unemployment because such a program would reduce the supply of cheap labor,” Sinclair said. “You will never persuade a capitalist to cause himself losses for the sake of satisfying people’s needs.”

Sinclair was a famous crusading journalist and novelist when he ran for governor, and his campaign was different in form from today’s anti-establishment bid. For one thing, it had far more infrastructure—and was more of a true movement—than Sanders’ effort has been.

Sinclair’s campaign was part of the larger “End Poverty in California” campaign. It swept up the nation, and was the subject of books and media coverage. More than 1,000 EPIC clubs were launched, giving Sinclair a network far deeper than an online fundraising database.

While Sanders has specific policies, they pale in specificity to Sinclair’s. He published a short book called: I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. It was full of ideas—from state takeovers of farms and factories, to the establishment of a state-managed cooperative economy, to a $50-a-month pension for the elderly, all to be financed by a California monetary authority.

Sinclair won the Democratic primary easily. Despite the fact that history does not necessarily repeat, what is most interesting to note, in light of current political facts, is what happened after Sinclair won the nomination.

Sinclair’s Republican opponent, incumbent Governor Frank Merriam, was a rather lackluster personality, not a Trump-type or a Cruz-type firebrand. Merriam had been lieutenant governor and assumed the governorship on the death of his predecessor only a few months before the 1934 general election. Despite his limitations, Republicans and many conventional Democrats felt so threatened by the prospect of a radical Sinclair governorship that they rallied around, and voted for, Merriam. With the aid of a major (and pioneering) negative campaign, including Hollywood-produced attacks against Sinclair, Merriam won the 1934 election.

That result, however, was not the end of the story. The EPIC campaign had substantially boosted Democratic registration in California and some EPIC Democrats were elected to the legislature, even as Sinclair lost. Four years later, an EPIC Democrat, Culbert Olson, was elected governor. Olson was something rarer than a socialist in American politics—he was an avowed atheist.

So you can read this tale in various ways. On the one hand, Sinclair lost the 1934 election. On the other, he brought new voters into the political process and generally tilted California toward the left.

Olson was not a particularly effective governor and on key issues often was opposed by members of his own party in the legislature. For example, Olson’s plan for a state health insurance program was quickly killed. In 1942, Olson was defeated for re-election by Republican Earl Warren. Republicans then held the governorship until 1959 when Jerry Brown’s dad, Democrat Pat Brown, became governor. For decades thereafter, Republicans and Democrats each had their share of governors.

So is there any lesson from Sinclair and his aftermath? Sinclair himself published an account in 1935, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, that entertainingly repeated his themes, and portrayed the campaign as a success, despite its defeat.

So yes, a losing socialist can change politics. But another lesson is that the general electorate tends to reject perceived radicalism, even when such candidates attract a cadre of loyal enthusiasts. And even if elected, such candidates would have to face the complex checks and balances of the American political system that make it easier to block great plans than to enact them.

The post Can Socialists Lose an Election and Still Get Their Revolution? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.