This story is from Democracy Digest:

The pandemic has caused a public health crisis that endangers the lives of millions of people, and threatens to cause enormous economic suffering. But it is also causing a political crisis, because it presents major challenges to public policy and endangers the elections at the heart of representative government, according to an open letter from U.S. political scientists:…

The signatories, writing under the rubric of Secure Democracy 2020, include many contributors to the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy.

“Democratic societies build resilience by strengthening the engagement of their citizens, because that is the way to build consensus and also to generate new ideas that work,” notes one observer. “There has not been a time since the second world war when the voice of citizens needed to be heard as much as it needs to be heard today.”

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