Two events reported on April 18, 2023, are highly pertinent to the authoritarian challenge the United States faces.
Famously, on the brink of opening statements in the trial for the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems had brought, on April 18 the respondent, Fox News, agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle the case. As NPR reported that day, “Dominion Voting Systems alleged that Fox stars, executives, journalists and guests defamed the election tech company for segments in which wild and spurious conspiracies held it had switched votes for then-President Donald Trump to Democratic challenger Joe Biden.”
Relatively obscurely, on that same day the New York Times reported that “Heider Garcia, the head of elections in Tarrant County, Texas, announced this week that he would resign after facing death threats, joining other beleaguered election officials across the nation who have quit under similar circumstances.” The Texas Tribune further reported that Gacia’s resignation was also connected to the recent election of the county’s top executive, who in his campaign “said ‘mail ballot harvesting’ and ‘Democrats cheating’ contributed to former President Donald Trump losing the 2020 election in Tarrant County.”
These events were among the most recent developments for an authoritarian movement that has gained substantial strength following the 2020 presidential election. The Fox News-facilitated campaign of lies that immediately followed the election fueled the attempts of the defeated president and his supporters first to overturn the outcome and then to manipulate state and local election processes and authorities to succeed “legally” in 2024 where they ultimately failed on January 6, 2021. This authoritarian movement also threatens election officials and workers like Heider Garcia as well as legislators and other elected officials who uphold their oaths of office responsibly and with integrity.
In response to such activity, in October 2021, The New Republic and The Bulwark simultaneously published an Open Letter in Defense of Democracy. The authors – Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey Isaac, and William Kristol – identified themselves and the letter’s 48 cosigners as “writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things.” While among them “[s]ome identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither,” they were united in their concern that “liberal democracy itself is in serious danger.” Toward its conclusion, the letter urged “all responsible citizens who care about democracy – public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens – to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.”
January 6 Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin expressed the same sentiment in an interview he gave in the summer of 2022 amid hearings of the January 6 Committee. Referring to his colleague, the Committee’s Republican vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney, Raskin said, “I told Liz I can’t wait to [go] back to disagreeing with her about everything. But right now, we are in a constitutional emergency, and we are all constitutional first responders.”
The defense of American democracy relies upon a grand coalition of Americans of all political leanings and from all walks of life. Over the last six years, many organizations have entered the “democracy space” or redoubled their ongoing efforts in it. These organizations, enlisting the support and participation of other “first responders,” engage the authoritarian challenge on multiple fronts, including: Election Reform, Election Protection, Rule of Law, Defense of Truth, and Depolarization.
Each of these five fronts – which appear in the first column of the table below – is the name of a heading below. Under each of the headings appear summaries of the relevant activities of the following six organizations (see also the top row of the table), which are but a subset of many such organizations doing this important work: Beyond Conflict, Braver Angels, Common Cause, Media Matters for America, Protect Democracy, and Unite America.
Election Reform
Common Cause, Protect Democracy and Unite America strongly promote election reforms designed to promote fairer representation of the electorate and to counteract the tendency of existing systems to elevate the most extreme candidates, including authoritarian ones. There is some overlap and coordination in their efforts and advocacy.
Proportional Representation
With few exceptions, legislative elections in the United States operate under the winner-take-all principle. This means, for instance, that candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives compete in single-member districts and the ones who win a majority in each join the state’s Congressional delegation. Majority rule can mean grossly inadequate representation for a substantial minority of a state’s population. According to a Pew poll, 40 percent of the Arizona electorate lean Republican versus 39 percent who lean Democratic. And yet Republicans outnumber Democrats 6-3.
Under the proportional representation reform that Protect Democracy (along with Unite America) has researched and continues to advocate, Arizona’s Congressional delegation could be restructured to include one or more multi-member districts. Voters would choose a party slate for the multi-member district(s) and the parties would fill the seats in proportion to the share of the vote that the party won.
Fusion Voting
General election ballots typically display a line for one or both of the major party candidates, and perhaps also a line for each of one or more minor party candidates. For every candidate who has qualified for the ballot there can be a single affiliated party. Members of a minor party may feel loyalty toward their own party and disaffection toward both major parties. However, such a voter may also recognize that voting for the preferred minor party candidate instead of the “lesser of two evils” might inadvertently help the other major party candidate, who is the “greater of the two evils.”
Protect Democracy has engaged in abundant research on and legal advocacy for fusion voting as a solution to this dilemma. Under fusion voting, a minor party could choose to place on its ballot line not a member of its own party but the preferable nominee of one of the major parties. A member of such a minor party would have the opportunity to support the choice of the party free of concern that doing so would help the more disfavored candidate.
Open and Nonpartisan Primaries
In most electoral jurisdictions, the Democratic and Republican parties choose their nominees for public office through closed primary elections. Typically only the most active members of the party participate in primaries. And as they tend to be furthest from the party’s ideological center, these primary voters tend to nominate the most extreme candidates to compete in the general election.
Unite America advocates for open and nonpartisan primaries. By opening up primary elections to unaffiliated voters or instituting “jungle primaries” in which candidates compete for nomination regardless of party affiliation, this election reform heightens the likelihood that the winner of the general election will have an outlook that is more broadly consistent with the constituency. An important benefit of the shift is that it decreases the likelihood that an authoritarian extremist will win office.
Ranked-Choice Voting
Straightforward, winner-take-all elections are conducive to the spoiler effect, in which voters who support a minor-party candidate who is unlikely to win may inadvertently increase the chances that the major-party candidate whom the voter likes less will prevail. That less-liked candidate could very well represent an authoritarian threat to democracy.
Under the several variants of ranked-choice voting, which Unite America champions, a voter makes several selections for a single ballot line in descending order of preference. If in the initial round of vote counting no candidate receives a majority, the candidate for the office who received the fewest first-rank votes drops out and the election officials redistribute those votes to the next-ranked candidates on the voters’ ballot. This process can proceed through multiple rounds until a candidate wins the majority. Ranked Choice Voting can be conducted both in general elections and in primaries, perhaps in the context of a nonpartisan or open primary.
Competitive Districts
Skewed Congressional (and state house) delegations commonly result from partisan redistricting following the decennial census. If a single party controls a state legislature, it can “gerrymander” the district lines to dilute the voting strength of the other party across many districts (“cracking”) while perhaps concentrating the other party’s voters in few districts (“packing”).
Common Cause and Unite America advocate for nonpartisan redistricting commissions, which are responsible for drawing the lines fairly. Common Cause publishes a periodical newsletter titled the Gerrymander Gazette providing updates on gerrymander developments nationwide. In 2016, Common Cause was the lead plaintiff in a suit, Common Cause v. Rucho, protesting the North Carolina legislature’s partisan gerrymander. After success in the lower courts, in 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that the judicial system does not have jurisdiction to settle disputes over partisan gerrymanders, only racial ones.
National Popular Vote
Common Cause advocates for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is an agreement among participating states that following a presidential election each will transmit a slate of electors to the Electoral College matching the nationwide popular vote winner. In all but two states (Maine and Nebraska), the candidate who gets the most votes, no matter how slim the margin, gets all of the state’s electoral votes. In 2000 and 2016, the candidate who won millions more votes nationwide lost the election on account of having lost several states by slim margins. The Compact would come into force once sufficient states accounting for 270 of the total 538 electoral votes have joined. Currently, 15 states and the District of Columbia with a total of 195 electoral votes have joined.
Election Protection
One of the ways in which the authoritarian movement seeks to gain power is by suppressing the ballot access of those who would oppose it. Another is to sow doubts about electoral institutions in order to disillusion and disincentivize prospective opponents. The authoritarian movement even seeks to discard election results.
Common Cause, Protect Democracy, and Unite America place strong emphasis on facilitating access to the ballot and promoting confidence in the mechanisms of elections and their outcomes.
Voter Assistance
Through its Election Protection project, Common Cause provides direct assistance to voters in understanding confusing ballots, navigating misinformation, and overcoming barriers that state and local governments may erect. It accomplishes this through the onsite volunteers it recruits and mobilizes, the legal experts who staff its toll free phone line (866-OUR-VOTE), and the voting tools to which it links. Aggregated in coordination with other organizations, these tools provide guidance on such matters as registering and checking one’s voter status, requesting absentee ballots, and establishing reminders and making a plan to vote.
Messaging and Advocacy
Protect Democracy confronts authoritarian forces with public messaging and advocacy that promote confidence in American elections and oppose efforts to restrict the vote.
Legal and Legislative Work
Common Cause and Protect Democracy deploy talented legal teams both to litigate for the cause of democracy and to promote legislative fixes to strengthen it. Notably, Protect Democracy was a leading outside participant in the successful effort to craft and in December 2022 enact the Electoral Count Reform Act. Much of the scheming to overturn the 2020 presidential election had hinged on now-clarified ambiguities in the 1887 Electoral Count Act.
Protect Democracy also was active in developing a larger package of election and good government reforms to address authoritarian abuses that the 45th president and his administration had perpetrated. Although the Protecting Our Democracy Act (H.R. 5314) achieved bipartisan passage in the House of Representatives, only portions of it, incorporated into a must-pass omnibus spending bill, achieved enactment.
Protect Democracy along with counsel from other organizations filed lawsuits to address dangerous harassment that supporters of the 2020 Trump campaign directed at the Biden-Harris campaign bus as it traveled in Texas in October 2020. The lawsuit alleges that the participants in the “Trump Train” violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 when they surrounded the campaign bus and sideswiped cars that were traveling with the bus.
Protect Democracy partnered with the Brennan Center for Justice to confront the Pence-Kobach Commission, which had as its unstated goal the suppression of votes from communities of color. The two organizations wrote to the Office of Management of Budget to explain the illegality of a request that the Commission had made to the states for their voter records, warned the state attorneys general, and then sued the Commission to halt the data request. The Commission dissolved before resolution of the case. Protect Democracy and the Brennan Center successfully sued a former member of the Commission who later launched a deceitful campaign to disenfranchise Virginia voters of color.
Vote at Home
During the pandemic, many states introduced or expanded the opportunity for voters to complete ballots in advance of Election Day at a convenient time and place. The ballot would arrive in the mail and after completing it the voter could mail it in or deposit it in a drop box or at a voting location. This has proved a highly successful and secure means of expanding access to the ballot.
Purported vote-at-home-related fraud is among the conspiracy theories that the authoritarian movement has put forward to dispute the outcome of the 2020 election and to sow distrust in future elections. With the goal of expanding access to the ballot and thereby strengthening democracy, both Common Cause and Unite America advocate for vote at home.
Voter Registration
Common Cause advocates for several voter registration reforms to expand access to the ballot:
Automatic Voter Registration for eligible voters when they apply for a driver license
Same Day Voter Registration to allow eligible voters to register even during an early voting period and through Election Day
Online Voter Registration to make it more convenient for eligible voters to register and update their information
Pre-Registration for citizens age 16 and 17, whose registrations would activate automatically at age 18
Ballot Integrity
Common Cause works with election officials and administrators at all levels of government to bring into force the following improvements:
Cease using old and outdated voting machines and move toward paper ballots
Require risk-limiting audits to ensure that election results are accurate
Require paper backups of voter registration databases
Eliminate online voting
Rule of Law
Protect Democracy’s rule of law work largely focuses on a practice rampant in authoritarian regimes: the politicization of justice. The former president politicized the Department of Justice (DOJ) in different areas, including in multi-faceted efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Protect Democracy employs several strategies in its efforts to promote an independent DOJ, including: research and analysis, public and legislative advocacy, and litigation. Additionally, Protect Democracy coordinated with thousands of DOJ veterans over several years.
In February 2020, Protect Democracy helped secure the signatures of over 2,600 of them on an open letter condemning the former president and attorney general for their interference in the sentencing recommendation for the president’s friend Roger Stone following his December 2019 conviction on felony obstruction of justice, false statement, and witness tampering charges. Stone had committed these crimes to undermine the 2017 House Intelligence Committee investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the role that Stone himself and the Trump campaign may have played in connection with that interference. The former president later commuted Stone’s sentence and then pardoned him, which freed Stone to participate in the attempted overturning of the 2020 election.
Protect Democracy’s anti-authoritarian efforts go beyond the DOJ and election-related matters. Abuses of power can take many forms, such as the misappropriation of federal funds for the purpose of border wall construction that Congress had explicitly rejected and the enactment of legislation like Florida’s Stop Woke Act that violates the free speech protections of the First Amendment.
In 2019, Protect Democracy’s legal team helped secure a nationwide injunction to block the diversion of Department of Defense funds, under the inappropriate invocation of national emergency authority, for border wall construction. As a founding member of the cross-ideological Power of the Purse Coalition, in 2021 Protect Democracy helped secure legislation to prevent future such abuses. Protect Democracy’s legal team also succeeded in the suit it filed in 2022 on behalf of Honeyfund.com and other Florida businesses to enjoin the Stop Woke Act from prohibiting their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings.
Defense of Truth
One of the basic tools of authoritarianism is the propagation of falsehoods that energize and recruit supporters, confuse and/or dispirit those outside its grasp, and sow discord in society. Falsehoods have the potential to distort the development of policy, undermine confidence in institutions, and jeopardize the conduct of free and fair elections.
Protect Democracy’s past work to counter and prevent pernicious falsehoods includes but is by no means limited to:
In preparation for the 2020 election, established a National Task Force on Election Crises, which held 18 briefings with representatives of 171 different media outlets and met one-to-one with all major social media platforms to explain the kinds of misinformation about the election that bad faith actors were planning to unleash.
Published a white paper on the “actual malice” standard for defamation lawsuits, such as the one that Dominion Voting Systems settled with Fox news and which will arise again in additional 2020 election-related cases that Dominion voting machine manufacturer Smartmatic will file;
Through its Law for Truth project, sued purveyors of 2020 election related falsehoods, including:
Dinesh D’Souza, True the Vote, Salem Media, and Regnery Publishing for the film 2,000 Mules, which defamed a Georgia voter with the false accusation of illegal ballot harvesting;
Gateway Pundit and Rudy Giuliani (separate lawsuits) for having defamed Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss with false accusations of election fraud;
Project Veritas for libel it perpetrated against a Pennsylvania postmaster;
Media Matters for America engages in comprehensive monitoring of media outlets and reports continuously on the disinformation that it identifies. For example:
An April 19, 2023 item reported on Salem Media host Dennis Prager’s assertion that, considering “the amount of corruption in the 2020 election,” “[w]e don’t know” whether it was stolen;
Another April 19, 2023 item reported on the 64 instances in 2023 alone that Fox News broadcast lies and conspiracy theories about elections and the January 6 insurrection;
An April 18, 2023 item provided a primer on the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit;
An April 5, 2023 item debunked a series of distortions about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of the former president.
Common Cause leads an election-season social media monitoring effort and has established a Disinformation Tip Line which members of the public can use to support suspicious activity that may undermine elections.
Common Cause also advocates for legislation to address the danger, such as the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act and the Honest Ads Act.
Depolarization
Apart from directly addressing authoritarians and their handiwork, perhaps the best approach is to cultivate understanding and goodwill among communities holding different outlooks and values.
Beyond Conflict has three main programs. Its Strengthening Democracy program defines the problem it is addressing as “rising levels of extreme political polarization,” which upon becoming truly toxic “is often a precursor to authoritarianism.”
Beyond Conflict operates like a think tank, and its Strengthening Democracy program undertakes research and develops interventions to address polarization. One such intervention was a video that Beyond Conflict titled “America’s Divided Mind” and entered in the Strengthening Democracy Challenge that Stanford University’s Polarization and Social Change Lab conducts. Out of 252 submissions, Stanford selected 25 for further study. Following its nationally representative study of the finalists, in September 2022 Stanford concluded that the video was the most successful intervention in reducing support for political violence and was among the five most effective in reducing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity.
The America’s Divided Mind video built upon previous research, including:
A May 2022 report titled Renewing American Democracy: Navigating A Changing Nation
A November 2021 report titled Authoritarianism: Understanding the Psychological Underpinnings of Democracy: Actualizing Evidence-Based Solutions to Strengthen Democracy
A June 2020 report titled America’s Divided Mind: Understanding the Psychology that Drives Us Apart
Most recently, in October 2022, Beyond Conflict produced a report titled Misperceptions about out‑partisans’ democratic values may erode democracy
Braver Angels is one of the leading organizations engaged in the work of depolarization. The organization operates through six program teams:
Braver Citizens – the grassroots network of local chapters (called “alliances”) that conduct workshops and debates to foster the skills and disseminate the messages that reduce polarization;
Braver Politics – an initiative to bring elected officials together into more cordial and constructive communication among themselves and with their constituents;
Braver Campuses – an initiative to bring Braver Angels skills and messages to all levels of education;
Braver Network – an initiative to coordinate and collaborate with local and national organizations, civic groups, and houses of worship;
Braver Media – the communications arm of Braver Angels;
Braver U – an initiative to foster collaboration with “academics, policy experts, data analysts, authors, film producers, artists and musicians.”
The backbone of the Braver Angels’ volunteer force is its cadre of over 2,500 event volunteers, who assist the local alliances by moderating workshops and debates and also organize local, state, and national events.
The basis of the Braver Angels approach is to foster greater generosity of spirit in which each individual strives to understand a different point of view, even if agreement with it is not possible. Part of the approach as well is to encourage people to engage with those with whom they tend to disagree and find both areas of agreement and ways to work together. Through these programs and this approach, Braver Angels strives to ignite what it calls a “Civic Renewal Movement.”
Conclusion
As the October 2021 Open Letter stated, “Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse.” The organizations profiled here – as well as many others too numerous to mention – are engaging energetically in defending liberal democracy. We all have a role in this vital cause.