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While largely envisioned as a civilian program, the report also spells out a number of needed steps to help ensure that U.S. security assistance in fragile states is coordinated into a broader political and economic strategy to build rather than undermine legitimacy and accountability.

There are models through which similar approaches by the United States and partners have worked in the past. When the United States has engaged in patient, long-term, and well-grounded strategic efforts to assist countries making difficult transitions, the results have often been impressive. Fifteen years of U.S. investment in both diplomacy and assistance have many viewing Colombia as a promising success story on the international stage. Similarly, considerable U.S. assistance to Liberia helped that country not only emerge from a ravaging civil war but also cope with the Ebola outbreak. Massive U.S. assistance to former Eastern bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall played a key role in supporting their accession to the European Union and securing lasting political and economic reforms.

In order to do this, the United States should draw on lessons from recent innovations in development and transform its approach to fragile states to center on mutually beneficial arrangements by developing Inclusion, Growth, and Peace Compacts that provide substantial, consistent, and targeted assistance aimed at developing stronger and more legitimate institutions in partner countries. This model incorporates many elements of the model employed by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC—a bilateral U.S. aid agency established in 2004 that uses a competitive selection process and data-driven approach in determining where it distributes its grants, while offering the United States assurances that its assistance is being wisely used and in measurable ways to build peaceful and reliable allies. However, Inclusion, Growth, and Peace Compacts, or IGPCs, represent a distinct and complementary approach to the MCC, particularly in recognizing the complex political and economic factors that often drive conflict. Inclusion, Growth, and Peace Compact countries would receive more diplomatic attention from senior U.S. officials, as well as greater support in working through domestic and regional political obstacles to reducing fragility. Where necessary, the compacts would incorporate security assistance administered by the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Department of Defense.

Under the program, selected fragile states where leaders are willing to abide by the agreed compact terms would be eligible for a five-year Inclusion, Growth, and Peace Compact administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, under oversight of a board chaired by the U.S. secretary of state. The compact would deliver multiyear commitments toward mutually identified core priorities determined through a joint, inclusive analysis of the constraints to a state’s peace and growth. IGPCs would generally focus on developing effective and legitimate institutions, including in the security sector, and shaping broad-based economic growth. Inclusion, Growth, and Peace Compacts would focus on a core set of 10 indicators to determine initial and continuing eligibility for the program.

From the moment the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC came down, it scandalized liberals. The decision heralded the “hostile corporate takeover of our democratic process,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) thundered at the time.

In 2017, a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission resigned, claiming “since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, our political campaigns have been awash in unlimited, often dark money.”* This was the animating sentiment of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president; he even went so far as to claim that billionaires are simply “buying elections.”

Five years ago Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, striking down limits on independent political spending. Probably the most misunderstood case in modern legal history, Citizens United simply doesn’t stand for what many people say it does.

For example, the Brennan Center for Justice described the case as “giving the wealthy more power to influence elections than at any time since Watergate and opening the floodgates for dark money.” A year ago, leading campaign-finance activist Fred Wertheimer said that it “struck down the longstanding ban on corporate expenditures in federal elections, a move that … created new avenues for corrupting our government.”

Foreign interference with our elections is already illegal. Under existing law, foreign nationals and foreign corporations are strictly prohibited from making political contributions and independent expenditures in connection with elections for federal, state, and local office. However, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has properly recognized that millions of Americans have not surrendered their right to political speech simply because they work at foreign-owned corporations. Thus, domestic subsidiaries of foreign companies like Anheuser-Busch, Bayer Health and Honda Motor, which are integral parts of the national and local economies, are permitted to engage in certain political activities, so long as those activities are directed by American citizens.

{mosads}The Disclose Act of 2017 introduced by Whitehouse would upend the existing law by categorically prohibiting any political activity by a corporation or subsidiary if more than 20 percent of its voting shares are foreign-owned. This percentage ownership limit is a smokescreen, however, as the bill also would much more severely prohibit any corporate political activity if a foreign national “has the power to direct, dictate, or control the [corporation’s] decisionmaking process.” Because the owner of even one share of a publicly traded corporation generally has such power through a shareholders meeting or a proxy vote, this provision likely would strip away the political speech rights of any public company with even one foreign shareholder.

A new study conducted by New York University has concluded that Russian influence operations on Twitter played no measurable role in Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. It’s a striking finding, and one that should prompt some reflection. Some Democrats grew obsessed with Russian meddling in American affairs during the Trump era, to the point where they questioned the election’s legitimacy. 

But while Russia’s goal of interfering with the U.S. elections has long been clear, what’s been less clear is whether it actually worked. The NYU study demonstrates that Russia’s influence operation on Twitter was a dud. Those who feared a new age of foreign countries shaping U.S. elections would be wise to consider the difference between Russia’s intentions and its actual effectiveness, and to contemplate how overestimating Moscow can distort their understanding of what’s happening at home.

There are fewer lobbyists in D.C. today than there have been in the past 20 years, even though lobbying groups spend more money promoting their causes than ever. Many former politicians are functional "lobbyists" who simply don't register as such, yet still do virtually the same job. Which is to say, if you believe bans on speech will change the dynamic of politics, you're incredibly naive.

It's unsurprising that the lobbyist-politician revolving door is nearly as busy as the journalist-political operative revolving door. Working in D.C. is a full-time job, and lobbying firms hire people with relevant experience and contacts. Who are they supposed to hire? Former bartenders? Snarky tweeters? Idealistic pundits? You can't outlaw Americans from gaining experience any more than you can outlaw them from staying in Washington. What you can do is vote for decent politicians, if such things exist.

With free and fair elections under ongoing attack, the U.S. Senate must pass the long-stalled Disclose Act in the coming weeks — to shine a bright light on the secret, “dark money” that underlies our toxic political system. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he plans to bring this legislation to the Senate floor.

In less than six months, Americans will vote in the federal midterm elections. When they vote, they deserve to know which powerful special interests, corporations, billionaires or foreign entities are spending money to shape election outcomes. Secret political spending, including on political ads, weakens democracy and corrupts the process by which Congress enacts policies or confirms judicial nominees.

Now more than ever, bold policy solutions are needed to help ensure that no foreign government, business, or person can unduly affect the nation’s democratic self-governance.

Before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, U.S. corporations had to finance campaign-related activity chiefly via disclosed donations from their employee-funded PACs. Corporations were not allowed to spend money directly from their corporate treasuries on independent expenditures—advertisements that expressly call for the election or defeat of a candidate. These ads are the lifeblood of election campaigns. But in Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that corporations are indeed permitted to spend corporate treasury funds on campaign-related ads, opening the door to unlimited corporate spending in U.S. elections.

Federal law is clear: Foreign money is prohibited in U.S. elections. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC created a loophole allowing corporations with significant foreign ownership to use their corporate coffers to spend unlimited amounts of money in U.S. elections.

With the next presidential election just seven months away, it’s critical that we address this loophole immediately. The good news is that the White House can direct the Department of Justice to take action today.

As long as public broadcasters take government cash, they’ll censor themselves. They should get off the teat. I’ll write the first check.

I say this as a fan of public broadcasting. We need independent media now more than ever, and state-funded media are not independent. Public broadcasters are less critical of the government than either they could or should be. Yes, comparatively speaking public broadcasting receives relatively little money from the government. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) gets about $450 million per year, which is essentially a rounding error in the federal budget, and NPR has consistently maintained that, on average, “less than 1%” of its “operating budget comes in the form of grants from CPB and federal agencies and departments.” But the absolute numbers are inconsequential. Public broadcasting fights tooth and nail to keep the meager scraps of public money it gets, demonstrating that the funding, however small, is significant enough to affect their behavior.

Much of the conversation around journalism and democracy concerns the problems of misinformation, disinformation and partisan silos. How do we ensure that Americans are getting accurate information? How do we help people resist conspiracy theories? How do we encourage readers and viewers to engage with perspectives outside their own?

I think these are important questions. But to the extent that the crisis in American democracy is shaped by the modern information environment, I don’t think the problem is misinformation, disinformation or partisan silos, because we’ve always had misinformation, disinformation and partisan silos.

Scholarship by Pickard and others finds that public media has myriad social benefits, including more diverse news coverage, increased public knowledge about politics and public affairs, and lower levels of extremist views. Building on this, a new study co-authored by Pickard and Timothy Neff, Ph.D., reveals that countries with independent and well-funded public broadcasting systems also consistently have stronger democracies. 

The study, “Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries”, shows that while other democracies have recognized the value of public media systems, America is a major outlier. Despite having the world’s largest gross domestic product (GDP), America spends a comparatively miniscule fraction –  less than half of a percent – on public media funding.

One approach to addressing this problem has been through changing the framework of elections themselves. In theory, alternative voting methods like ranked choice voting (RCV) offer a solution to some of the problems that have plagued our democratic process. While some academic focus has been given to the theoretical merits of alternative voting methods, many of the tangible aspects have gone overlooked. Elections administrators have been left without the essential knowledge necessary to effectively plan for and implement these types of election reforms. This study was designed to determine whether implementing RCV methods at the local level is responsible for increases or decreases to the cost of elections within the municipalities that have implemented it.

Elections cost data were obtained from seven local governments that switched to RCV between 2004 and 2011. Similar data were also obtained from seven control municipalities that used traditional voting methods such as plurality primaries or majority-rule votes. These localities were intentionally chosen for their similarity to the corresponding RCV cities on metrics such as population, annual budget size, location, election cycle schedule, jurisdiction in charge of elections, and political makeup of its citizens. Cost data were sought for all elections within a time period of ten years before and ten years after RCV was first implemented. These costs were then aggregated into standard two-year election cycles in order to control for the natural variances in election spending associated with election cycles. They were also converted into per-capita costs so that direct comparisons could be made between municipalities of vastly different sizes.

In ranked-choice voting, if no candidate gets a majority of the vote, candidates are iteratively dropped from the election and their support is reallocated among the remaining candidates until one candidate has a majority. In Florida in 2000, then, Nader would have been eliminated in the first round and his support reallocated between Gore and Bush. If most Nader supporters preferred Gore to Bush as their second-place choice, these votes would have swung Florida, and the presidential election, to Gore.

However, ranked-choice voting makes it more difficult to elect moderate candidates when the electorate is polarized. For example, in a three-person race, the moderate candidate may be preferred to each of the more extreme candidates by a majority of voters. However, voters with far-left and far-right views will rank the candidate in second place rather than in first place. Since ranked-choice voting counts only the number of first-choice votes (among the remaining candidates), the moderate candidate would be eliminated in the first round, leaving one of the extreme candidates to be declared the winner.

The good news is, there’s a simple, proven fix to this problem: ranked choice voting. This allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference — first, second, third and so on. If voters’ first-choice candidate can’t win, their vote simply counts for their next choice.

Just like that, the “spoiler” problem vanishes. If you want to vote for Libertarians without “spoiling” the chances of Republicans, simply rank Libertarians first and Republicans second. Same on the other side — rank Greens first, and Democrats second.

In cities where ranked-choice voting has been adopted, candidates devote less time to attacking each other, and voters say they are happier with more civil and more positive campaigning.

New York now joins more than 15 U.S. cities and one state (Maine) in using the voting method, which is a significant improvement over the traditional process of whichever-candidate-gets-the-most-votes-wins. This reform is increasingly taking hold because the case for ranked-choice voting is simple and profound: It gives voters more options, allows them to express their preferences better, and makes politics more civil and cooperative.

Through a 2020 ballot measure, Alaskan voters enacted a top-four primary. In this system, candidates list themselves on the ballot in three possible ways: as affiliated with a political party or political group, as undeclared or as nonpartisan. The four candidates who get the most votes move on to the general election, in which ranked-choice voting is used to determine the winner. (In ranked-choice voting, rather than selecting just one candidate, voters can instead choose several and rank them.)

This reform aims to increase the likelihood that candidates with the broadest appeal to voters, rather than more factional candidates, will win the election. In a traditional primary, in which many candidates can split the vote, factional candidates can prevail by drawing, say, just 25 percent of the vote. Because factional candidates often hold more extreme views, this reality helps fuel dysfunction in American politics.

Winner-take-all elections award victory to candidates scoring the most votes, sometimes far less than a majority. They benefit organized voter blocs, such as the partisan bases, usually a small fraction of the electorate, and disfavor the larger group of loosely affiliated party members and independents. Whether right- or left-leaning, this larger group is less absolutist than party bases and correspondingly more sympathetic to less absolutist candidates. 

Give moderate and independent voters a voice

Three states — Maryland, Nebraska, and New York — introduced legislation in January to tax digital advertising services. Maryland’s bill, S.B. 2, stems from an op-ed piece by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer. He said business models of online digital platform companies, especially the giants like Facebook and Google, have undermined the public’s trust in democratic institutions by allowing their platforms to become “havens for dangerous misinformation and hate speech,” thereby eroding “the commons of shared values and norms on which democracy depends.” To encourage these companies to shift to a “healthier, more traditional model,” he suggested that instead of using regulations or the application of antitrust law to ban the current model, which harvests user information to enable targeted advertisements, the federal and state governments should tax the revenue from these targeted advertisements. At the state level, Romer suggested it could be done via “a type of sales tax on the revenue a company collects for displaying ads to residents of the state.”

Maryland’s S.B. 2 imposes a new gross receipts tax on digital advertising within the state, including banner and search engine ads, website or application ads, and ads within a piece of software. The tax is determined by an apportionment formula. Nebraska’s bill, L.B. 989, extends its sales tax to digital advertising. New York’s bill, A09112, imposes a new 5 percent gross receipts tax on the gross income of companies harvesting user data that is shared with other companies. All these bills have several things in common: They violate the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (PITFA), as well as several constitutional provisions.