Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

by Steven Levitsky

electoral arrangements that overrepresent certain territories or groups, allowing parties to win elections without capturing the most votes, weaken the incentive to adapt.

America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College, rather than directly by voters. Only in America can a president be “elected against the majority expressed at the polls.”

Among democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change, for it requires supermajorities in two legislative chambers plus the approval of three-quarters of the states.

UPHOLD THE RIGHT TO VOTE.

we should do the following: 1. Pass a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens, which would provide a solid basis to litigate voting restrictions. 2. Establish automatic registration in which all citizens are registered to vote when they turn eighteen. This could be accompanied by the automatic distribution of national voting ID cards to all citizens. The burdens of the registration process should not deter anyone from voting. 3. Expand early voting and easy mail-in voting options for citizens of all states. It should be easy for all Americans to cast ballots. 4. Make Election Day a Sunday or a national holiday, so that work responsibilities do not discourage Americans from voting. 5. Restore voting rights (without additional fines or fees) to all ex-felons who have served their time.

6. Restore national-level voting rights protections. In the spirit of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, parts of which the Supreme Court struck down in 2013, we should reinstate federal oversight of election rules and administration. This could apply only in states and localities with a history of voting rights violations, following the VRA model, or to all jurisdictions equally, following the model of the 1890 Lodge bill. 7. Replace the current system of partisan electoral administration with one in which state and local electoral administration is in the hands of professional, nonpartisan officials. This will help ensure fairness in the updating of voter rolls, access to polling places, and the voting and vote-counting processes. Nearly every other established democracy, from France and Germany to Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, and South Africa, has nonpartisan referees to oversee elections.

ENSURE THAT ELECTION OUTCOMES REFLECT MAJORITY PREFERENCES.

EMPOWER GOVERNING MAJORITIES.

Abolish the Senate filibuster

Establish term limits (perhaps twelve or eighteen years) for Supreme Court justices to regularize the Supreme Court appointment process so that every president has the same number of appointments per term.

John Roberts, later chief justice of the Supreme Court, recognized this when he championed judicial term limits in 1983, when he was working in the Office of White House Counsel under President Ronald Reagan: The framers adopted life tenure at a time when people simply did not live as long as they do now. A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for twenty-five or thirty years was a rarity then, but it is becoming commonplace today. Setting a term of, say, fifteen years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence.

Loving America with a broken heart means recognizing our own country’s failure to live up to its stated democratic ideals—its failure, for too long, to provide liberty and justice for all. It means committing ourselves to achieving those ideals, by building an inclusive, multiracial democracy that all Americans can embrace.