| Chapter 1: | Symptoms |
fully diagnosing the patient’s problems, no one should take up election reform without a full diagnosis of what is ailing elections.
A full diagnosis requires cataloging the symptoms, identifying the illness, and locating the causes of the illness. Academics, pundits, and reformers have pointed out a wide range of problems with elections in the United States—including low voter turnout, problematic campaign finance laws, failures of the mass media, questionable redistricting practices, and so on—but few have performed the complete diagnosis of the system that is critical to prescribing treatment. The first section of this book is dedicated to that purpose; in the second section I discuss the prescriptions. I begin diagnosing the problem in this chapter by identifying the symptoms of the “illness” manifest in U.S. elections. Then in chapter 2, I catalog the specific afflictions that are making elections ill. In chapter 3, I complete the diagnosis by documenting the factors that have caused or contributed to illness.
The symptoms of the sickness afflicting elections are probably the best known aspects of the problem, recognizable to even the most casual observers: voter turnout in U.S. elections is low, substantially lower than voter turnout in most other democratic nations;7 significant portions of the public are poorly informed and vulnerable to manipulation, often unaware of many important issues as well as lacking a basic understanding of the operation of the American political system; and a good number of citizens are overly cynical about the nature of politics and government.
Low Voter Participation
The 2008 presidential contest took place at the end of eight years of a very unpopular presidency and at a time of tremendous economic upheaval. The problems blamed (rightly or wrongly) on the Bush administration—the Iraq war, the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, the expansion of executive authority in the war on terror, and the collapse of the economy—and the Republicans’ very conservative and uncompromising approach to politics had left the public discontented and demanding