Over the last year, the debate over elections and voting rights has been poisoned by name-calling and conspiracy theories, distracting from the legitimate issues concerning America’s large and complex election system. That the U.S. is a union of 50 states complicates matters further. The 50 states are supposed to serve as “laboratories of democracy” in a wide range of areas, but the area where such experiments are perhaps most consequential is elections. When a swing state like Pennsylvania decides to change how it conducts its elections, that change can affect the country. What one state implements today, other states might soon adopt, too.
These realities raise questions about how our elections should be run and the impact of different election policies on the national and state level. Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund’s new book, Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote (Encounter, 2021), seeks to answer these questions by providing a comprehensive overview of elections in the U.S., discussing potential ways to fix them, and warning about the risk of new election policies that could do more harm than good.
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