What Vermont can offer American Democracy

Like many in The Valley, I spent much of last week up late, refreshing election results, pondering implications. One optimistic takeaway? Maybe, just maybe, civility is back. As a former democracy specialist with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), I’ve seen all sorts of elections. This week, one of my early turns as an election observer in Ghana came unexpectedly to mind. On December 7, 2016, Nana Akufo-Addo from the New Patriotic Party (NPP) defeated his perennial and bitter rival, John Mahama from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) after a hard fought, rancorous and violent campaign. After the election, I spoke with a friend who had taken a senior role in the new NPP government. We’re starting from zero, she said. The NDC took everything when they left, the computers, the hard drives, even the paper records. There was nothing and no one in her new offices when she arrived.

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