Question

a democracy qualifies its own test during the election analyse this statement

Answer 1

as is allows the citizens of that country to vote

Answer 2

Elections are at the very core of democracy. Even if democracy is conceived as involving much more than elections, and even if an ideal democracy includes important forms of direct participation by citizens in many aspects of public decisions, still the most basic constraint on oppressive state authority that we have is the fact that we elect the decisionmakers and can get rid of them if we dislike what they do. Any evaluation of democracy in America must include a careful examination of its electoral system and how it works. In this chapter we will explore two broad themes about voting and elections in American democracy. The first concerns an important theoretical puzzle about democratic elections: why do people bother voting in the first place? Given that a single vote almost never decides large elections, on the face of it voting might seem to be a waste of time: doing something that has no practical effects. Answering this question will help us get a sense of some of the conditions which strengthen or undermine the vitality of electoral politics. The second theme concerns the problem of how deeply democratic are elections in the United States. In the transition to democracy within authoritarian regimes the code words “free and fair elections” are often invoked in assessing democratic a society really is. There are countries that hold regular elections in which a single candidate receives 99% of the vote, but we don’t consider this in the slightest democratic. But what precisely do we mean by “free and fair”? There are obvious ways in which an election might be unfair – stuffing the ballot box, faking the numbers, preventing people from voting by intimidation or simply excluding them from the voter lists. Until the 1960s in the U.S. South most African-Americans were blocked from voting through various devices. The most notorious was the infamous literacy tests in which potential black voters had to show a thorough knowledge of the constitution (for example) before they could be registered, whereas White voters had much less demanding tests. This, by any standard, was unfair. Fraud, intimidation, and illegal exclusions are obvious ways in which elections can be rendered less democratic. Although these kinds of processes do happen in the United States – for example in the 2000 presidential election when the state of Florida purged its voter lists of felons in such a way that many non-felons, mostly black, were illegitimately denied the right to vote – fraud and repression of voters are not generally the most important issues in the U.S. We will focus instead on three crucial features of our electoral system that undermine the fairness and democraticness of elections: (1) representation rules, (2) the boundaries of electoral districts (3) Campaign finance.