According to a new report from the Electoral Integrity Project, a collective effort between Harvard University and the University of Sydney, North Carolina can no longer be classified as a functioning democracy.
The EIP rated the state’s electoral integrity for this year’s election in the same low categories as “pseudo-democracies” such as Sierra Leone, Indonesia and Cuba. North Carolina received a score of 58/100, pointing out the poor performance of legal framework and voter registration.
“If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table—a deeply flawed, partly-free, democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world,” wrote Andrew Reynolds, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Reynolds is one of the main specialists for the EIP model systems created to analyze 50 elements of the electoral process established in 2012. Several years later, Reynolds never thought he would’ve seen the day he would bare witness to his hometown receiving the lowest scores on record.
The evaluation also critically highlighted North Carolina’s flawed political system, which doesn’t come as a shock considering the power struggles shown by Gov. Pat McCrory, which caused a legislative uproar early in the year. The announcement additionally dissects three primary collapses in the state’s democratic infrastructure including unwarranted districting, suppressing the votes of African Americans by lack of access to polling and commandeering governor Roy Cooper’s power as his term approached through ill-advised legislation.
Furthermore, North Carolina is now listed as the worst state for discriminatory gerry-mandering in the United States and the worst ever analyzed by the EIP in the world. Based on the findings of the non-partisan, 100-point scale system, North Carolina unquestionably lost its democratic privileges.
