An academic study claiming North Carolina is only slightly more democratic than Cuba is not only ridiculous, but also dangerous.
This absurd charge was repeated recently in a Raleigh News & Observer op-ed by political science professor Andrew Reynolds, co-founder of the Electoral Integrity Project.
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 currently ranks as 56 in the group’s measurement of electoral integrity in 127 countries.
Though the EIP’s claim that the Tar Heel State is only slightly more democratic than Cuba dates back a few years, it has been repeated recently by multiple newsrooms, including Vox.
