Electorates, both in the United States and elsewhere, are increasingly losing faith in how elections are run and the veracity of their outcomes. This growing skepticism with election outcomes is endangering our democratic systems and making it difficult to ensure fair and representative governance. This decline in the trust in elections is attributed to various factors. First, voting procedures like voter ID laws and the manner in which votes are counted have affected how people perceive the fairness of elections. Second, the use of social media to spread mis- and dis-information about electoral processes has been effective in shaping people's views. Finally, new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, have created new ways for elections to be manipulated, thereby exacerbating concerns about their integrity. This panel of experts considered the role of these various factors in the decline of trust in elections and discussed the future of the electoral process.
This event was co-sponsored by the Global Economic Challenges Network, the Department of Government, the Georgetown Americas Institute, and the Free Speech Project at Georgetown University with the DC Political Economy Center and the Wilson Center's Brazil Institute.
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Julia Cagé is a professor of economics in the Department of Economics at Sciences Po Paris and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and at the CESifo. She is particularly interested in media economics, political participation, and political attitudes. Her work has been published in leading journals in economics, and she has authored award-winning books on the media, on political funding, and on political conflict. In 2023, she received the Best Young French Economist Award. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2014.
Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology. He has written two award-winning books, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation (2009) and Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security (2019, with Abraham Newman), and his most recent book is Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (2023, with Abraham Newman).
Miriam Kornblith is senior director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, which she joined in 2006. She is an emeritus professor at the Central University in Caracas. From 1998 to 1999, she was vice president and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela, where she oversaw five electoral processes. She is a sociologist from the Catholic University Andrés Bello in Caracas and pursued doctoral studies in political science at the Central University of Venezuela.
Vincent Pons is a professor at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University Economics Department. In his research, he examines the foundations of democracy: how democratic systems function, and how they can be improved. He received the 2023 Best Young French Economist Award. He is also a cofounder of the company Explain. He studied economics and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and received a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Bruna Santos (moderator) is director at the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center. Before joining the Brazil Institute, she served as vice president and innovation director at the National School of Public Administration in Brazil (Enap) and as an adjunct professor at Columbia University. In 2021, she was honored by Apolitical and the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Agile Governance as one of the 50 most influential leaders championing innovation in policy making.
