Study claiming North Carolina isn’t a democracy is dangerous and ridiculous

His article, titled “North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy,” came amid attempts by Republican state lawmakers to limit incoming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s power.

Several newsrooms, including MSNBC and the Huffington Post, repeated the unflattering claim, despite the many questions surrounding the EIP’s methodology, and the fact that previous versions of the group’s global measurement of electoral integrity ranked North Korea ahead of most other nations.

Individual reporters were also quick to share Reynolds’ dubious claim on social media:

The Raleigh News & Observer op-ed reads:

In the just released [Electoral Integrity Project] report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table — a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Cuba ranks 56 out of the 127 countries surveyed by the EIP, just two spots down from where the group lists North Carolina.

However, despite the popularity of the rankings, the group’s methodology not only leaves much to be desired, its findings are also likely politically motivated, according to the statistician Andrew Gelman.

Reynolds, tellingly, singled out North Carolina even though the state ranks higher than Ohio, Michigan and Alabama, to name a few. North Carolina has recently been at the center of culture wars and partisan warfare.

“If Reynolds, Norris, etc., don’t like what the North Carolina legislature has been doing, fine. It could even be unconstitutional, I have no sense of such things,” Gelman wrote. “And I agree with the general point that there are degrees of electoral integrity or democracy or whatever. Vote suppression is not the same thing as [a] one-party state and any number-juggling that suggests that is just silly, but, sure, put together enough restrictions and gerrymandering and ex post facto laws and so on, and that can add up.”

The result looked like “an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence,” Gelman concluded.

Absurdly enough, North Korea actually ranked 65 out of a 127 countries in the EIP’s 2014 global measurement of voter integrity. Political ideology and “plain old incompetence” would certainly explain how the Hermit Kingdom managed to score above 50 out of 100 on categories including “electoral laws, “voter registration,” “voting process” and “results.”

“[T]he response rate for North Korea is given as 6%,” Gelman noted, citing the group’s methodology and data. “And the report said they consulted about 40 ‘domestic and international experts’ for each election. Hmmm … 6% of 40 is 2.4, so maybe they got 3 respondents for North Korea, 2 of whom were Stalinists.”

North Korea was quietly removed from all studies published after 2014.

Aside from being absurd, the EIP study is also dangerous, as Gelman and his associate, Nick Stevenson, rightly note.

It’s the sort of thing that bad faith actors will cling to as they attempt to obscure and justify their actions. When human rights activists and dissidents correctly and accurately accuse countries with one-party rule of fraud and other election abuses, the accused can point to supposedly reliable reports and say with a straight face, “This study says otherwise.”