The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that unexpected and unpredictable situations can hinder the conduct of general elections around the world. The book is a comprehensive analysis of the organization of elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the theoretical perspective, it familiarizes the public with specific electoral solutions adopted during the pandemic in selected European countries (Italy, Germany, Lithuania, Serbia, Russia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Poland). The editors believe that this book will bring closer the specific solutions adopted in the considered countries during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide readers with a multi-faceted understanding of elections in emergency situations. Contributors are: Roman Bäcker, Ryszard Balicki, Piotr Chrobak, Rafał Dudała, Kamil Glinka, Maciej Górny, Maciej Hartliński, Marcin Jastrzębski, Izabela Kapsa, Agnieszka Kasińska-Metryka, Joanna Kielin-Maziarz, Jakub Klepański, Oliwia Kowalik, Krzysztof Koźbiał, Aleksandra Kuczyńska-Zonik, Natalia Kusa, Elżbieta Lesiewicz, Natasza Lubik-Reczek, Agnieszka Łukasik-Turecka, Paweł Malendowicz, Martinas Maluzinas, Radosław Marzęcki, Magdalena Musiał-Karg, Adam Pluszczyk, Agata Pyrzyńska, Marcin Rachwał, Joanna Rak, Kamila Sierzputowska, Krzysztof Skotnicki, Piotr Walewicz, Jacek Wojnicki, and Waldemar Wojtasik.

From the nation’s leading expert, an indispensable analysis of key threats to the integrity of the 2020 American presidential election As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In this timely and accessible book, Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans. Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.

Analyzing the electoral systems of various countries, including those of developing nations, this work examines the relationship between democratic theory values and the electoral institutions used to achieve them. Empirical data is used to find the institutions most appropriate to each model.

Behind the deeply contentious 2020 election stands a real story of a broken election process. Election fraud that alters election outcomes and dilutes legitimate votes occurs all too often, as is the bungling of election bureaucrats. Our election process is full of vulnerabilities that can be — and are — taken advantage of, raising questions about, and damaging public confidence in, the legitimacy of the outcome of elections. This book explores the reality of the fraud and bureaucratic errors and mistakes that should concern all Americans and offers recommendations and solutions to fix those problems.

On cover, the word "right" has an x drawn over the letter "r" with the letter "f" above it.

Rage is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest. Woodward, the #1 international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers into the Oval Office as Trump’s head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans. In 17 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months—an utterly vivid window into Trump’s mind—the president provides a self-portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the “dynamite behind every door.” At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president. Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making. Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents. Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film.” Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. “Don’t worry about it, Bob. Okay?” Trump told the author in July. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get to do another book. You’ll find I was right.”

Government lockdowns, school closures, mass unemployment, health and wealth inequality. Political Philosophy in a Pandemic asks us, where do we go from here? What are the ethics of our response to a radically changed, even more unequal society, and how do we seize the moment for enduring change? Addressing the moral and political implications of pandemic response from states and societies worldwide, the 20 essays collected here cover the most pressing debates relating to the biggest public health crisis in the last century. Discussing the pandemic in five key parts covering social welfare, economic justice, democratic relations, speech and misinformation, and the relationship between justice and crisis, this book reflects the fruitful combination of political theory and philosophy in laying the theoretical and practical foundations for justice in the long-term.

Allegations that widespread voter fraud is threatening to the integrity of American elections and American democracy itself have intensified since the disputed 2000 presidential election. The claim that elections are being stolen by illegal immigrants and unscrupulous voter registration activists and vote buyers has been used to persuade the public that voter malfeasance is of greater concern than structural inequities in the ways votes are gathered and tallied, justifying ever tighter restrictions on access to the polls. Yet, that claim is a myth. In The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine C. Minnite presents the results of her meticulous search for evidence of voter fraud. She concludes that while voting irregularities produced by the fragmented and complex nature of the electoral process in the United States are common, incidents of deliberate voter fraud are actually quite rare. Based on painstaking research aggregating and sifting through data from a variety of sources, including public records requests to all fifty state governments and the U.S. Justice Department, Minnite contends that voter fraud is in reality a politically constructed myth intended to further complicate the voting process and reduce voter turnout. She refutes several high-profile charges of alleged voter fraud, such as the assertion that eight of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote, and makes the question of voter fraud more precise by distinguishing fraud from the manifold ways in which electoral democracy can be distorted. Effectively disentangling misunderstandings and deliberate distortions from reality, The Myth of Voter Fraud provides rigorous empirical evidence for those fighting to make the electoral process more efficient, more equitable, and more democratic.

The book is a comprehensive study of the processes of holding elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the theoretical perspective, it brings the viewer closer to the specific electoral solutions adopted in selected European countries in the emergencies.

Elections often have to be held in emergency situations. The Covid-19 pandemic was one of the most serious emergency situations that the world has seen. The rapid spread of the virus presented a huge humanitarian threat—but also an unparalleled challenge to electoral stakeholders globally seeking to protect electoral integrity during times of uncertainty. This volume identifies how the pandemic affected electoral integrity, what measures were put in place to protect elections and what worked in defending them. It brings together a comprehensive set of 26 country case studies to explore how elections were affected on the ground, what measures were put in place and what worked. These case studies are of elections which took place in the eye of the storm when practitioners and policymakers were operating under uncertainty and without the benefit of hindsight. To learn lessons in a more systematic way, this volume also provides a thematic analysis of electoral integrity during the pandemic using crossnational studies. This provides the big picture for policymakers, practitioners and academics looking back at the crisis. The volume therefore seeks to contribute towards the future development of policy and practice. However, it does so by using academic research methods and concepts which enable greater confidence in the policy lessons, as well as contributing directly to the scholarship on democracy, democratization and elections. The volume includes 11 areas of recommendation based on the evidence collected in this volume to protect electoral integrity in any future emergency situation.