An organization spawned by the radical United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney in Australia has issued a report that concludes that the state of North Carolina has a democracy on par with Cuba and Iran.

Of course, the American left has jumped on this study as if it's red meat and they are starving dogs.  A few choice cuts from the study:

The report points to three main flaws in North Carolina’s political system: extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression of black and brown residents, and the usurpation of incoming governor Roy Cooper’s power through hasty legislation.

“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,” UNC-Chapel Hill political scientist Andrew Reynolds wrote in Thursday’s op-ed.

The EIP is a nonpartisan project that grades democracies worldwide on a 100-point scale. The gradings are based on multiple factors including voter access to polling sites, the influence of state-controlled media and the potential that an election has been rigged.

For this year’s election, North Carolina received a score of 58/100, Reynolds wrote. That’s in the same neighborhood as the governments of Cuba, Sierra Leone and Indonesia.

Patsy Keever, chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, agrees that her state’s current efforts at governing do not adhere to democratic principles.

“Senator [Phil] Berger and Speaker [Tim] Moore are power hungry leaders whose number one goal is to protect their power no matter the cost,” Keever said in a statement to The Huffington Post, referring to the state’s Senate leader and House speaker.

“Since 2010, the NC GOP has systematically engaged in a dangerous partisan political agenda, making it harder for people to vote, changing the nature of the State Board of Elections and stripping an incoming Democratic governor of power,” she said. “That’s not what democracy looks like ― and North Carolinians deserve better.”

The flaws in North Carolina’s democratic system predate this year’s election, according to the EIP report. The Republican-controlled legislature racially gerrymandered its own district lines to such a degree in 2011 that a federal court struck down the electoral map as unconstitutional on Nov. 29 and ordered the state to hold special elections in 2017. The EIP concluded that the state of North Carolina had the least democratic redistricting in the world.

“There is nowhere in the world outside of America that allows politicians to change the district lines to this degree; it’s a recipe for disaster,” Reynolds told HuffPost. “You’ve got voters locked into a system where they’re unable to change the power dynamics of the state, regardless how they vote.”

Aside from the giggleworthy statement that the EIC is "non-partisan," the methodology of this study is fatally and irrevocably flawed:

The EIP produces an impressive forest of data to form its rankings on the legitimacy of elections worldwide; but what is the basis for all these numbers? Though it is not so easy to find, the method involves selecting a range of criteria and then seeking ‘expert opinion’, from a group of unnamed people. That is, the numbers and rankings rely on ‘expert opinion’, and those experts are anonymous.  There is only anecdotal recourse to more standard methods, such as actual opinion polls, or actual participation rates.

I examined the EIC website looking for comments on its methodology and could find only that the organization relies on "datasets" compiled by its researchers to create its grading system.  While the "Global Research" website is pro-Trump and anti-globalization, it appears to make some excellent points about how EIC operates.

How were the 50 criteria used to "judge" the level of "democracy" in a state or country created?  That question is as important as the "results" they come up with, because it is ridiculously easy to create criteria to fit a biased agenda.  For example, voter ID laws are systematically and routinely seen by the left as "voter suppression" of the black and brown vote – despite absolutely no reliable evidence that this is so.

How about gerrymandering?  The Justice Department routinely throws out redistricting plans from Southern states, so the idea that it's a remarkable event that the 2011 lines were changed doesn't pass muster.  Besides, there is no state in the nation that gerrymanders its district lines more to destroy a political party than California.  California is a one-party dictatorship with so-called "non-partisan" elections, where the top two finishers in primaries, regardless of party, compete for congressional seats.  ("Non-partisan" elections was the favorite tactic of racist white Democrats in the South for decades.  It diluted the vote of the few blacks who were allowed to cast their ballot and assured Southern Democrat white domination of the political process.)  For all intents and purposes, a viable Republican party does not exist in California.

Entirely subjective criteria compiled by radical liberals, "anonymous" experts giving their opinion on what the criteria mean – this is a recipe for a politcal attack, not a serious effort to examine any flaws in North Carolina's electoral process.