Ms Temarii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. USEFUL VOCABULARY..................................................................................................................................................... 2
10 2. US VOTING SYSTEM........................................................................................................................................................ 3
A) A TWO-PARTY SYSTEM.............................................................................................................................................................. 3
B) THE ELECTIONS => ELECTING THE PRESIDENT.................................................................................................................................3
C) VOTING LAWS AND CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS......................................................................................................................4
D) CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS.................................................................................................................................................4
15 E) FEDERAL VOTING RIGHTS LAWS..................................................................................................................................................4
F) VOTER FRAUD, VOTER INTIMIDATION, AND OTHER ELECTION CRIMES................................................................................................5
G) ALTERNATIVE METHODS OF VOTING.............................................................................................................................................5
3. A TIMELINE..................................................................................................................................................................... 5
4. TEXTS STUDY.................................................................................................................................................................. 6
20 A) TURNOUT............................................................................................................................................................................ 6
B) ELECTORAL COLLEGE...........................................................................................................................................................8
C) REFERENDUM: PUTTING A SAFETY VALVE ON DEMOCRACY..........................................................................................................9

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1. USEFUL VOCABULARY

Politics A polling station To back down on an issue

The political spectrum A blank vote 70 To dodge an issue
5 Polarization To endorse a candidate Demagoguery
Politicking To stump for a candidate No-speak / doublespeak
Gerrymandering 40 To take the stump To expatiate on
Statesmanship To stump for vote To hammer a point
To be a bulwark against A hung parliament 75 A scathing remark
10 An incumbent To tote up Polemics
To veer leftward, rightward Vote buying To savage/ to lambast
To assume/reverse a stand 45 To be marred by irregularities To be at variance with
Political leaning A recount To antagonize
A cleavage, a rift The turnout 80 To fall out
15 Bipartisan / bipartisanship A referendum A spat
Two- party system A citizen ballot initiative To squabble
To cut across the party lines 50 Direct democracy To come to a deadlock
The ultraright / the far right To placate
Politics / posturing 85 To kowtow to
20 Canvassing / voting Political savvy To be reform-minded
Public approval Dependable/trustworthy To stifle reforms
Rigged elections/polls 55 Humane A turncoat leftist
A direct election Compassionate … with a human face
A by-election Grit 90
25 A voter initiative Bold Civic life
To secure votes Industrious Freedom of speech
Proportional representation 60 To disown Freedom of worship
A two-round system To backpedal Freedom of the press
An eligible voter The rank-and-file 95 Freedom of expression
30 A stay-away voter A die-hard Freedom of thought
An absentee voter A crony Freedom of conscience
Electoral turnout 65 A hardliner Freedom of peaceful assembly,
A ballot slip To wield influence Freedom of opinion.
To cast a ballot Fireside chat
35 To go to the poll To take a stand
100 To canvass a district
To hand out leaflets
A political campaign
To jump in the fray
A voter swing
105 To build a lead
A groundswell
A rout
To be trounced

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2. US VOTING SYSTEM1

a) A two-party system

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b) The elections => electing the President

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c) Voting Laws and Constitutional Amendments

Laws governing U.S. elections date back to Article 1 of the Constitution, which gave states the responsibility of
overseeing federal elections. Numerous Constitutional amendments and federal laws have been passed in the
years since to ensure all Americans have the right to vote and the ability to exercise that right.

5 d) Constitutional Amendments
The 15th Amendment2 to the Constitution gave African-American men the right to vote. However, many of
them weren't able to exercise this right for nearly 100 years. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means used by
some states made it difficult for them to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated these barriers that
prevented many African Americans in the South from voting.
10 The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, gave American women the right to vote.
The 24th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1964, eliminated poll taxes, which had
disproportionately affected African Americans as a barrier to voting in federal elections.
The 26th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age for all elections to 18.

e) Federal Voting Rights Laws

15 Various federal laws passed over the years help protect Americans' right to vote and make it easier for citizens
to exercise that right:
The Civil Rights Acts provide some of the early federal statutory protections against discrimination in voting
(42 U.S.C. 1971 & 1974). These protections originated in the Civil Rights Act of 1870, and were later amended
by the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964.
20 Voting Rights Act of 19653 - This law prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate based on
race, color, or membership in a language minority group. It also requires certain jurisdictions to provide election
materials in languages other than English.
Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984 - This law generally requires polling
places to be accessible to people with disabilities.
25 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) of 1986 - This law allows members of
the U.S. Armed Forces and overseas voters to both register to vote and vote by mail.
National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 - This law increases opportunities to register to vote and
creates procedures for maintaining voter registration lists, making it easier for people to stay registered.
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 - This law authorizes federal funds for election administration and
30 creates the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It also requires states to adopt minimum standards on voting
systems, provisional ballots, voter information posters on election days, and for first time voters who register to
vote by mail and statewide voter registration databases. The EAC helps states to comply with these
requirements.
Military and Overseas Voting Empowerment (MOVE) Act of 2009 - This law amends the Uniformed and
35 Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act to improve access to voting by military and overseas voters. It requires
states to provide electronic access to various parts of the election process, mail absentee ballots to certain
voters at least 45 days before an election, and develop a free access system to inform military and overseas
voters about whether their voted ballots were received and counted.
State Voter ID Laws
40 Two-thirds of states require that you show some form of identification before you’re allowed to vote at the polls.
Learn more about states' Voter ID requirements.

2
The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to ensure state and local governments do not pass laws or policies that deny
American citizens the equal right to vote based on race. As the leading democracy of the world, the U.S. should work to keep
voting free, fair, and accessible. That’s why the Voting Rights Act is so important. It makes sure every citizen, regardless of
5 their race, has an equal opportunity to have a say and participate in our great democracy.
On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, removing a critical tool to
combat racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 5 of the landmark civil rights law, jurisdictions with a history of
discrimination must seek pre-approval of changes in voting rules that could affect minorities. This process, known as
“preclearance,” blocks discrimination before it occurs. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Court invalidated Section 4 — which
10 determines the states and localities covered by Section 5 — arguing that current conditions require a new coverage formula.
3
Under Section 5 of the landmark civil rights law, jurisdictions with a history of discrimination must seek pre-approval of
changes in voting rules that could affect minorities. This process, known as “preclearance,” blocks discrimination before it
occurs. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Court invalidated Section 4 — which determines the states and localities covered by
Section 5 — arguing that current conditions require a new coverage formula.
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f) Voter Fraud, Voter Intimidation, and Other Election Crimes

Federal election crimes fall into three broad categories:

 Campaign finance crimes, such as when candidates accept donations that violate the amounts or
5 sources permitted under the law
 Civil rights violations, involving cases of voter intimidation, coercion, threats and other tactics aimed
at suppressing a person’s ability to vote
 Voter fraud and voter registration fraud, such as when a vote is illegally cast in the name of a dead
person or someone who’s moved. Many states have strengthened their voter ID requirements in the
10 past few years to try to curb voter fraud.

g) Alternative methods of voting

 Early Voting. In 33 states and the District of Columbia, any qualified voter may cast a ballot in person
during a designated period prior to Election Day. No excuse or justification is required.
15  Absentee Voting. All states will mail an absentee ballot to certain voters who request one. The voter
may return the ballot by mail or in person. In 20 states, an excuse is required, while the other 27 states
and the District of Columbia permit any qualified voter to vote absentee without offering an excuse.
Some states offer a permanent absentee ballot list: once a voter asks to be added to the list, s/he will
automatically receive an absentee ballot for all future elections.
20  Mail-in Voting. A ballot is automatically mailed to every eligible voter (no request or application is
necessary), and the state does not use traditional precinct poll sites that offer in person voting on
Election Day. Three states use mail voting.

3. A TIMELINE

25 1776: Although the Declaration of Independence has just been signed and the United States’ independent
status has not yet been recognized by many countries, the right to vote begins in America as a legal privilege
almost exclusively available to white, property-owning, Protestant men.
1788: With the ratification of the Constitution, all slaves are counted as 3/5’s of a single person on the national
census.
30 1790: The Naturalization Act bars all persons of Asian descent from becoming naturalized. Only “free white”
immigrants are recognized as eligible for naturalization.
1792: New Hampshire becomes the first state to eliminate its property requirements, thereby extending the
right to vote to almost all white men.
1828: Maryland becomes the last state to remove religious restrictions when it passes legislation enfranchising
35 Jews. White men can no longer be denied the right to vote on the basis of their religion.
1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo renders the lands now known as Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas,
and Nevada US territory. All Mexican persons within these territories are declared US citizens, but
simultaneously denied the right to vote by English proficiency, literacy, and property requirements along with
violence, intimidation, and racist nativism.
40 1856: North Carolina becomes the last state to eliminate its property requirements. The right to vote is
extended to all white men in America.
1857: In the landmark case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the US Supreme Court rules that “a black man has no rights
a white man is bound to respect.” African Americans are further deprived of the right to citizenship and, by
extension, the right to vote.
45 1866: The first Civil Rights Act grants citizenship, but not the right to vote, to all persons born in the USA.
1869-70: The Fifteenth Amendment is passed in Congress and ratified by the states. The right to vote is now
legally guaranteed to all male citizens regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
1882: Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which establishes restrictions and quotas on Chinese
immigration while legally excluding Chinese persons from citizenship and voting.
50 1889-1890: Poll taxes and literacy tests specifically designed to reduce African American voting power are
introduced in Southern states for the first time.
1896: Louisiana is the first state to implement a grandfather clause in its election policy. No male citizen whose
grandparent was deprived of the right to vote may exercise that right himself.
1915: The US Supreme Court finds Oklahoma’s grandfather clause unconstitutional in Guinn v. United States.
55 1919-20: The Nineteenth Amendment is adopted by Congress and ratified by the states into law. The right to
vote is now guaranteed to all citizens regardless of gender.

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1922: The US Supreme Court rules that persons of Japanese origin are insufficiently white to qualify for
citizenship in Takao Ozawa v. United States.
1924: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declares all non-citizen Native Americans born in the USA to be
citizens with the right to vote.
5 1937: Georgia’s poll taxes are found constitutional by the US Supreme Court in Breedlove v. Suttles.
1943: The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed, and Chinese persons are now eligible for naturalization.
1948: The last state laws denying Native Americans the right to vote are overturned.
1952: The McCarran-Walter Act recognizes the right to citizenship of first-generation Japanese Americans.
1957: The Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorizes the US Attorney General to file lawsuits on behalf of African
10 Americans denied the right to vote.
1960: The Civil Rights Act of 1960 is passed, making collection of state voter records mandatory and
authorizing the Justice Department to investigate and access the voter data and history of all states in order to
carry out civil rights litigation.
1964: The passage and ratification of the 24th Amendment outlaws poll taxes nationwide.
15 1964: The concept of one person, one vote is upheld by the US Supreme Court as the national standard
applying to all legislative bodies in Reynolds v. Sims.
1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed, making discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, gender,
or religion in voting, public areas, the workplace, and schools illegal.
1965: The Voting Rights Act is signed into law, prohibiting any election practice that denies the right to vote to
20 citizens on the basis of race and forces jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to submit any changes
to its election laws to the government for federal approval prior to taking effect.
1971: The 26th Amendment sets the national voting age to 18 and over.
1974: The Supreme Court rules that states may deny convicted felons the right to vote in Richardson v.
Ramirez.
25 1975: The Voting Rights Act’s special provisions are once again extended. New amendments permanently
banning literacy tests and mandating assistance to language minority voters are also added.
1995: The Supreme Court rules that race may not be the “predominant factor” in redistricting in Miller v.
Johnson.
2004: The Supreme Court found claims of partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable in Vieth v. Jubelirer.
30 2009: The Military and Overseas Empowerment Act establishes more efficient means for troops stationed
overseas and expatriates to request and receive absentee ballots through the mail or electronically. 4

4. Texts Study

a) TURNOUT

35 Much has been made of the similarities between this week's election of Donald Trump to the White House and
the British vote to leave the European Union just a few months before. There's good reason for this — both
votes followed fierce campaigns dominated by debate over globalization and immigration, and both produced
widely unexpected results that shocked much of the world. Yet there are also a number of areas where the two
votes don't look so alike.
40 And one may be especially surprising: Turnout.
Yes, despite the global political earthquakes both elections caused, the difference in turnout between the U.S.
election on Nov. 8 and the Brexit referendum on June 23 is notable.
When it came time for Britain to make its historic vote on its continued membership of the E.U., 65.4 percent of
voting age population headed to the polls.
45 But when it came time for Americans to vote in their own, similarly historic, election, it appears that around one
in two eligible voters simply didn't turn up. While the final tally is still being counted, one estimate from the
United States Election Project (USEP) suggested that turnout on Tuesday was around 56.9 percent, slightly down
from 58.6 percent in 2012.

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This relatively low turnout can have a pronounced affect on the outcome of the race. For example, though
Donald Trump won the presidency after an unusually divisive and controversial campaign, he appears to have
done so with fewer votes than Mitt Romney lost the election with in 2012.
The United States has long been unusual within the developed world for its low turnout in elections. For the past
5 few decades, turnout with the voting eligible population during presidential elections has largely stayed stable
between 50 and 60 percent. In midterm elections, it can be considerably worse: It was just 36.7 percent in 2014,
the lowest in 72 years.

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20 Earlier this year, Pew Research Center compiled recent voter turnout data from the International Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IIDEA) for developed countries. It found that the United States clearly
lagged behind most of its peers when it came to turnout: It ranked 31st among the 35 countries in the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The IIDEA data, which uses a slightly different
calculation than the USEP data, found that 53.6 percent of the U.S. population voted in 2012. Meanwhile,
25 Belgium had an 87.2 percent turnout rate in 2014, Turkey's was 84.3 percent in 2015, and Sweden's was 82.5
percent in 2014.
Why is the United States so far behind the pack? There are plenty of factors. For example, in some countries —
including both Belgium and Turkey — voting is compulsory. The laws aren't necessarily strictly enforced (which
is why you aren't seeing 99 percent turnout), but it still has a major effect.
30 Another is different policies on voter registration. Other developed countries have voters automatically
registered as they become eligible. Alternatively, in many countries the government goes out of its way to find
and register voters. However, in the United States, potential voters are expected to register themselves, and it's
often not a simple process. Understandably, this results in a far lower proportion of registered voters: Just 65
percent of the voting age population is registered, Pew notes, compared to 91 percent in Britain and 96 percent
35 in Sweden. While turnout among registered voters in the United States is fairly high — 84.3 percent in 2012 —
the lower levels of registration mean that overall turnout remains low.
Timing is also a factor. U.S. elections are held on a Tuesday, when people generally have to work. For many, this
is a huge inconvenience. “I’m at work all the time,” Eliza Holgate, a 19-year-old who works at a Golden Tan
tanning salon in Utah, told the New York Times when asked to justify why she wasn't voting. Other countries
40 with higher voter turnout than the United States, including France, Germany and Japan, hold their votes on the
weekends. In some other countries, such as India, Election Day is a national holiday.
The 2016 election in the United States threw up other problems too. As Paul Waldman of The Plum Line notes,
this was the first election in decades without the full protection of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. There are
widespread accusations of voter suppression.

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However, when contrasting the U.S. election with Britain's Brexit vote, it's also worth remembering the
differences between the two votes. The Brexit vote was a single-issue referendum. Voters were asked a simple
question: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”
Ahead of the election, many had feared a low turnout, perhaps even lower than Britain's last general-election
5 turnout of 61.1 percent, as it would be hard to persuade people who wanted to keep the status quo to vote.
In the end, turnout was far higher than most expected. It seems that people were aware of how important the
vote was — and perhaps more notably, they felt passionately about their vote. In the U.S. election — one in
which both of the major parties candidates had remarkably low favorability ratings — this passion may have
been harder to summon.
10 American voter turnout is still lower than most other wealthy nations, The Washington Post, Adam Taylor,
November 10, 2016

b) ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Electors were intended to be faceless hacks whose independent exercise of judgment was neither wanted nor
15 permitted.
Here is Question One on this year’s Constitutional Law exam:

The “electoral college” is

a) a terrible idea that has gone wrong repeatedly and now bids fair to destroy the Republic.
20 b) a wise creation of all-wise “Founding Fathers” who foresaw precisely this moment and set up the
“college” to protect the People from themselves.
c) Both of the above, even though that makes no sense at all.
WTF? How did we get here?

25 At least from now until December 19, when the electors will meet in the state capitals to vote, we are likely to
hear a good deal about answer 3 from Democrats and supporters of Hillary Clinton. (In the spirit of disclosure, I
am both.) My Atlantic colleague Peter Beinart explains that the choice of Donald Trump is “the kind of
democratic catastrophe that the Constitution, and the Electoral College in particular, were in part designed to
prevent.” In Time, author Michael Signer tells us that “the Electoral College was primarily designed to stop a
30 demagogue—a tyrannical mass leader who preys on our prejudices—from becoming President.” Harvard Law
professor Lawrence Lessig argues in The Washington Post that “the framers created a safety valve . . . . Like a
judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not
— the people’s choice.”
The implication is that, if the electors chosen in November were to conclude on December 19 that Donald
35 Trump was a frenzied byproduct of democracy run amok, they would be constitutionally justified in choosing
Hillary Clinton instead.
I would fervently like to believe that this argument is sound history and constitutional law, and that it has some
chance of preventing Trump from becoming president. But historically it’s more or less backwards. At the most
basic level, America in 2016 is not a nation in which “the people” have been seduced into enthusiasm for a
40 majoritarian demagogue. Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, is “the people’s choice.” A Trump presidency, God
help us, will be a minority government, the product of the Framers’ electoral-vote system working exactly how it
has all too often worked.
I see nothing in the record to suggest that the Framers actually feared a situation in which a designing schemer
would command majority popular support but be blessedly blocked by wise electors. Many, or perhaps most, of
45 them, from the record we have, feared the reverse.
That is, they believed that, with the exception of George Washington, no political figure would ever become well
enough known (after all, the population of the U.S. in 1787 was nearly four million people!) to command a
popular majority. “Nineteen times out of twenty,” delegate George Mason predicted, the state electors would
not produce a winner. When that happened, the delegates decided, choice of a president would be thrown into
50 the House of Representatives.
Today’s electoral-college supporters often quote Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 68: “the immediate election
[of the president] should be made by men most capable of ana[y]zing the qualities adapted to the station, and
acting under circumstances favourable to deliberation,” Hamilton wrote.

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The Federalist, brilliant as it is, isn’t a definitive guide to what the Framers “intended”—it is a sales document,
written after the fact at high speed in order to convince wavering voters in New York to support ratification of
the Constitution. Hamilton here is a car salesman explaining that the undercoat package might seem useless
but is really worth it. Here’s why the “deliberation” idea of electors is false. Under Article II § 1 cl. 3, the electors
5 never meet as a group. They meet “in their respective states” on a date set by Congress—“which Day shall be
the same throughout the United States.” Kept resolutely apart, they vote once and only once. If by chance, a
majority of electors nationwide favor one candidate, he or she becomes president. If there’s a tie, or no
candidate gets a majority, then the House decides. The electors get thanked and sent home.
In short, nobody in 1787-88 thought of the electors as anything but what they are today—faceless hacks whose
10 ideas and judgment are neither wanted nor permitted. I’ve been present when electoral candidates were
selected; the main criteria were party loyalty and patronage. Wisdom is seldom sought after, and would be
pretty much useless.

In fact, for all the nobility ascribed to it today, the real reason for the system is simply this: some
15 states didn’t want to let most of their people vote. Slaves, obviously did not get the ballot (in 1792,
when the Philadelphia convention convened, only one of the 13 American states was a “free
state”). States wanted power in proportion to their population of slaves, however, and the
“electoral college,” with its rule counting slaves as 3/5 of free persons, guaranteed that. Beyond
that, however, some states wanted to keep the ballot in the hands of the well-to-do. At the
20 Philadelphia convention, Madison summed up the problem. “The people at large” were “the fittest”
source of presidential election—“as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive
Magistrate of distinguished character.” But there was a problem: “[t]he right of suffrage was much
more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states” and the South “could have no influence in
the election on the score of the Negroes.” Electors would give the South power without penalizing
25 its elites for failing to emancipate black Americans or enfranchise poor white ones.
This is exactly why the system remains in place today. It allows local elites to limit access to the
ballot without losing national clout.
In a popular vote system, communities gain influence when more of their people vote. (Ask
someone in your local politics which parts of town have the most influence with local officials.) So if
30 the president were picked by the voters directly, every state would desperately want its people to
turn out. But in an electoral-vote system, a state retains the same number of electoral votes
whether 100 percent or 10 percent of its people vote. As we saw this year in Wisconsin and North
Carolina, that makes meddling with voting rights very tempting indeed.

35 This, then, is the mechanism some people I respect are putting forward as the nation’s savior. Would it be
democratically legitimate for electors to switch their votes because Clinton has won the popular vote? Why? This
result was foreseen when the campaign began. In 2000, both George W. Bush and Al Gore began before the
election to assemble arguments to support taking office even after losing the popular vote. John Kerry’s
campaign was also ready to justify replacing George W. Bush in 2004 even if Kerry lost the popular vote to
40 Bush.
Clinton’s popular-vote victory is nearly unprecedented in its sheer size. The American people rejected Trump by
a wide margin. As a minority president claiming a mandate for dictatorial powers, he is a mortal danger to
American democracy. But a Clinton presidency obtained by such a switch would, in a different way, also risk
destroying the system; Trump voters would be as outraged by that maneuver as Clinton voters if the tables
45 were turned. Electors are of course free to vote their consciences. If they think a popular-vote loser shouldn't be
president, they don't have to vote for him. If they become convinced of something awful about Trump--say, that
he is a tool of a hostile intelligence service subverting the United States--they can defect.
But let’s not pretend that Madison and Hamilton wanted them to. Nobody in 1787 foresaw 2016.
If they had, I wonder whether they would have bothered with the whole business.
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The Electoral College Wasn't Meant to Overturn Elections, The Atlantic, Carlos Barria, 27 November 2016

c) REFERENDUM: Putting a Safety Valve on Democracy

55 In the wake of last year’s dramatic vote on the Greek bailout and ahead of the Brexit showdown, referendums
are getting a bad rap. Last week, in an article titled “Let the people fail to decide,” The Economist noted that

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such votes can “lead to incoherent policies,” and thus “fewer would be better.” Not to be undone, John Kay of
the Financial Times warned against the tendency to “confuse democracy with populism,” drawing from British
statesman Edmund Burke’s famous 1774 speech in which he argued “your representative owes you, not his
industry only, but his judgment: and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Are
5 they missing anything?
Whatever drawbacks referendums may have, they are the only true form of democracy. The United Kingdom,
like most modern countries, is a nation in which power resides in representatives who are supposed to follow
the preferences and will of their constituents but are removed from them. Switzerland is the closest to what
Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates had in mind when democracy was conceived. The country has had 611
10 referendums since it was established in 1848, on issues ranging from abortion to asking taxpayers to pay for the
children’s national zoo.
No system is perfect. Referendums are disruptive and laborious, and they can be abused if issues qualify too
easily. The yes-or-no nature of the decisions makes it easier for majorities to ride roughshod over minority
interests. People also need to exercise sufficient care to form their judgement on the matter at hand, and then
15 make the effort to vote. There are considerable advantages to having a dose of referendums every now and
again. The ancient Greeks were wary of mob rule and felt that they were good opportunities to vent anger and
act as circuit breakers to placate crowds and keep them from throwing rocks—as may occur at the forthcoming
Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The debate and choice involved in a referendum also center on a
particular issue rather than a personality or a political party. Just follow a few days of press coverage in the
20 United States and the United Kingdom and compare the emphasis on personal attacks versus policy content.
Referendums also force voters to have skin in the game. It is easy to blame a politician for disappointing us, but
who is to blame when we’ve made the choice ourselves? The debate over Brexit shows that people care, and
caring is the foundation of any well functioning democracy.
Most importantly, referendums mitigate three of the most toxic features of republics. Elected officials have
25 incentives to overpromise and under-deliver, so disappointment is practically pre-programmed. They are also
encouraged to accelerate the benefits for “right now” and postpone the payment to “later,” which punishes
future generations. Third, lobbying is more cost-effective when a few politicians can be swayed to support a
particular interest. Convincing large numbers of people requires greater transparency and more intense
deliberation. As Jürgen Habermas, the famous German philosopher, argued, “the better the debate, the better
30 the decision.” His words may have even inspired the founders of The Economist when they penned their
mantra: “to take part in a severe contest between intelligence which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid
ignorance obstructing our progress.”
Switzerland, that bastion of popular votes, has been ranked by the World Economic Forum as the most
economically competitive country in the world for seven years running. It has among the lowest rates of
35 unemployment, crime, public deficits, and CO2 emissions. It has among the highest per capita incomes,
confidence levels in its government, and funding of its pension schemes. The Economist even ranked it last year
as the country in which one would most wish to be born—without seeming to fully understand what has made it
this way. The Swiss have achieved this in good part by repeatedly voting in referendums for no shorter work
weeks, enforcing a debt moratorium on parliament, passing laws to encourage the use of renewable energy,
40 and even voting to increase taxes that were necessary to become more fiscally sound.
Compare this to the record of countries such as the United Kingdom and others. The deficiencies such an
exercise would reveal may explain why the people of the United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere are
increasingly frustrated with their political systems that are more dependent on representatives. Fewer than
three in ten Americans trust their federal government (slightly higher than the level of trust in a used car

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salesman), down precipitously from nearly eight in ten one generation ago, according to Pew Research Center.
The United Kingdom has experienced a more moderate, yet similar, decline.
If nations were able to attract candidates of Edmund Burke’s quality and stature, then there might not be a
need for referendums. But this seems unrealistic. The Swiss model turns the equation on its head, based on the
5 premise that there are too few Edmund Burkes alive and that we should not rely on them anyway. The
robustness of a system is measured by how much abuse it can withstand. It is far better to engineer a system to
ensure that politicians, even the inferior ones, manage to serve their constituents' interests. Referendums can
be decisive in this respect. Yet The Economist criticized referendums because “they tend to make politicians
look as if they do not know what they are doing.”
10 Precisely. The Swiss can call referendums to challenge and reverse legislation passed by parliament. Such votes
have succeeded only two percent of the time, according to Laurent Bernard from the Institute of Political
Science at the University of Zurich. (Around six percent of the laws passed by parliament have been challenged
by referendum so far, with 178 referendums.) But the very possibility of repudiation, and the embarrassment
that ensues, may be the reason challenges are so rare and may be the most effective control to ensure that
15 what parliament does is what the people want.
Switzerland is not alone. Sweden voted against using the euro in 2003; Chile voted for free schooling for
everyone in 2011; New Zealand opposed a partial privatization of public-owned companies in 2013; Uruguay
decided not to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 16 years in 2014; Ireland refused to abolish its Senate
in 2013; and Bulgaria accepted the construction of a nuclear plant in 2013. Such successes show that the
20 people as a whole can be a more reliable source of wisdom and positive outcomes than any group of politicians.
At a time when people are increasingly disappointed with their political systems, it is worth reflecting on what
has gone wrong and experiment with ways to fix it. In this respect, republics may find that more democracy is
better than less. Referendum Revenge, Foreign Affairs, R. James Breiding, June 1, 2016

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