After weeks of counting and recounting ballots in Honduras’ contested presidential election, and deadly clashes between security forces and protesters, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) announced Sunday that incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernández is the country’s next leader.

The European Union, one of the international bodies observing the Nov. 26 election, appeared to back those results, announcing that, despite earlier concerns, the recount showed no irregularities.

But the Organization of American States (OAS), which also sent official election observers, had a different take: “The only possible path for the winner to be the Honduran people is a new call for general elections,” as Secretary General Luis Almagro said in a statement.

The OAS found irregularities in the election, including “deliberate human intrusions into the computer system, intentional elimination of digital traces,” open or tampered ballot boxes, and “the narrow difference of votes” between the two front-runners. The margin of victory was roughly 50,000 votes, or 1.6 percentage points, according to the TSE.

Calling an election fraudulent to the extent that it’s deemed invalid is a rarity in Latin America, where observation missions have taken place since Chile’s 1988 referendum on then-dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Protests are continuing as foreign governments move to congratulate Mr. Hernández, or tip-toe around the situation, buying time. What happens next – when the government has been called out on the international stage, yet has no legal obligation to follow the OAS’s guidance – underscores the fragility of trust in governing institutions in the region, and throws into question the role of democratic watchdogs like election monitors. Over the past three decades, election monitoring has become a global norm, but in some ways that has diluted the power election monitors have in practice.

“What’s at risk is the whole essence of democracy,” says Jennie Lincoln, director of the Latin America program at the Carter Center, who has worked as an election observer since the 1980s. “If leaders or governments or political parties can stomp on the tenets of democracy, of open, free, and fair participation, then the whole system is undermined.” 

Winner at last?

Hernández accepted his victory this week, calling for national dialogue and inviting opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla to meet. Under Honduran law, Mr. Nasralla’s Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship coalition party and others have five days to lodge complaints with the election authority before the victory is cemented.

“We have fulfilled our obligation [and] we wish for there to be peace in” Honduras, TSE President David Matamoros said Sunday after announcing Hernández’s win.

Honduras has garnered global attention since its vote count took a sudden turn late last month, when Nasralla’s seemingly insurmountable lead eroded after nearly a day and a half of silence from the TSE. But the country has a track record of consolidating power when the world looks away, says Christopher Sabatini, who teaches Latin American affairs at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs. 

“People’s attention will move on. That’s what happened in 2009,” he says, referring to the year when Hernández’s National Party orchestrated a coup to remove then-President Manuel Zelaya from office. “They just waited. Refused to step down,” and offered to hold new elections later that year to “wipe the slate clean,” Sabatini says.

The National Party won that election, and went on to stack the Supreme Court with party sympathizers. That laid the groundwork for allowing Hernández to run again this year, despite a Constitutional ban on reelection.

A complicated choice

“Most elections all over the world are validated [by international observers] because the bar for invalidating an election is so astronomically high,” says Irfan Nooruddin, an election expert at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Dr. Nooruddin did a statistical analysis of TSE-provided Honduras election data as a consultant for the OAS this month, which concluded, “I would reject the proposition that the National Party won the election legitimately.”

Still, he says, it was a surprise when the OAS called for fresh elections.

Calls for a re-vote are rare because “no one wants to be accused of undermining sovereignty. You don’t want international observers’ decisions substituting the will of the people,” Nooruddin says.

But when that kind of hesitation leads to approval of fishy elections, it can also weaken citizen faith in democracy and international observers. Hondurans went into the polls already skeptical: Almost 66 percent of Hondurans don’t trust their elections, according to Vanderbilt University’s Latin America Public Opinion Project.

“If people get away with undermining democracy [during an election] then what’s next? Acceptance of corruption? Acceptance of violence? Acceptance of trouncing human rights? There’s a spiral that goes downward,” says Dr. Lincoln.

Election monitors may justify signing off on elections as free and fair, even if they were imperfect, because “if we go about calling out elections as illegitimate all the time, no one will invite us back,” Nooruddin says.

Many argue it’s better to have monitors present in an educational capacity than missing from the scene entirely. But in the case of Honduras, there was a long list of needed changes to improve the integrity of the electoral system given after the 2013 presidential race, like a more independent TSE, that were never put into practice.

“What’s the lesson for the international community?” Lincoln asks. “Either know that you’re pushing a rock up a hill, or change some kind of collaboration or coordination with the governments so that these reforms can be made.”

Observing the observers

There was a strong shift toward election monitoring globally in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, as the United States emphasized and encouraged democratic reform around the world. “Elections were seen as the most obvious indicator of a democratic transition,” says Nooruddin, who co-authored a book touching on the disconnect between quality elections and quality democracy.

As a result, “there’s almost an obsessive focus on election day in this broader promotion of democracy,” he says. “We are good at having better elections, but we rush to equate that with better democracy, which is shortsighted,” he says.

Election monitoring has become an international norm, but that doesn’t always mean fairer elections. For leaders more committed to power than democracy, being able to point to the presence of an international observer during an election – no matter their standards – gives a semblance of legitimacy.

That’s recently become the case in countries like Venezuela or Nicaragua, where the governments have relied on observations by newer monitoring groups like The Latin American Council of Electoral Experts (CEELA). The group is reportedly made up largely of former electoral magistrates from across the region, who aren’t necessarily trained in election observation and tend to helicopter in for election day – as opposed to weeks ahead of time, as is the traditional practice of well-respected observation groups.

“They are a stooge for whatever government wants them,” says Mr. Sabatini, who recently wrote about the group on the website The Global Americans, where he’s executive director. “They go through the motions of election monitoring” and in the end can help a government look legitimate. 

“They are diluting the system and in some ways making it meaningless,” he says.

CEELA is not alone. Other election-monitoring groups, such as the Union of South American Nations’s, have also been accused of less stringent standards. “All international observers are not equal,” Lincoln says. 

But the OAS and the EU are two of the most respected monitoring bodies participating in the region. The EU has walked back its initial statements made at a press conference earlier this week supporting the TSE decision, noting on Twitter that its conclusions aren’t absolute until it publishes its final report.

“Election monitors have become so widely used that [the system] arguably isn’t useful anymore,” says Nooruddin. “The most shocking thing to happen in Honduras is that the OAS had the guts to say ‘This is not good enough.’ ” 

Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star/AP

Rachel Campbell, secretary of the Stafford NAACP (c.), joins about 60 other protesters outside the Stafford County Government building to call on the registrar to count all absentee ballots in Stafford, Va., Nov. 13.

With control of Virginia’s House of Delegates hanging in the balance in last month’s election, every potential vote mattered – particularly in the state’s hotly contested 28^th District.

The candidates knew it. So did election officials.

Throughout Election Day, workers at the Stafford County election office repeatedly telephoned the US Postal Service to make sure there were no absentee ballots waiting for delivery. The calls were made at least once every hour all day until polls closed at 7 p.m.

The race was indeed tight. By the time all votes were counted, Republican Robert Thomas, Jr. held an 82-vote lead over Democrat Joshua Cole.

Then, at 10 a.m. the morning after the election, the local Post Office delivered a stack of 55 uncounted absentee ballots.

“There is no possible way … that these ballots should not have been available to us on Election Day before close-of-polls,” Director of Elections Greg Riddlemoser wrote in an exasperated email to various officials.

Nonetheless, somehow 55 potential votes slipped through the cracks.

Lawyers for Mr. Cole, the trailing Democrat, filed an emergency motion asking a federal judge to order election officials to open and count the 55 mail-in ballots. They argued that not counting the ballots would disenfranchise 55 voters.

“These voters did everything they were supposed to do in order to have their ballots counted,” the lawyers wrote in their motion to the judge.

Virginia law requires that absentee ballots be received in the election office before the close of polls on Election Day. It is a bright-line rule.

After a hearing, the judge denied the request.

The plight of those 55 uncounted ballots – and the resulting disenfranchisement of 55 Virginia voters – highlights a little-known fact about voting by mail. Despite its obvious convenience and growing popularity, it can be an extremely unreliable way to cast a ballot.

“Voting by mail has this big uncertainty about it,” says Brian Gaines, a political science professor at the University of Illinois. “It is just a less secure kind of voting.”

Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star/AP

Joshua Cole, Democratic candidate for delegate in the 28th district, speaks to protesters gathered outside the Stafford County Government building in Stafford, Va., Nov. 13. The protesters called on the county registrar to count all absentee ballots.

Nationwide, roughly 24 percent of all votes in the 2016 presidential election were cast via absentee ballots. That’s 33 million votes, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission. But what many Americans don’t know is that nearly 400,000 of those ballots were never counted, having been disqualified for reasons ranging from invalid signatures to simply being late.

While 400,000 votes may not make a difference in a landslide, most elections don’t end in a landslide. For example, the 2000 presidential election was decided in Florida by 537 votes. In a close race every vote can make a difference. That is particularly so, election experts say, in down-ballot races at the state and local level during low turnout elections.

A fundamental shift

A few decades ago, voting by absentee ballot was the exception to the rule. It usually required a voter to provide an acceptable reason justifying her or his inability to vote in person.

Today, 27 states and the District of Columbia allow anyone to vote absentee if they so choose. Three states – Oregon, Washington State, and Colorado – conduct their elections entirely via ballots transmitted by mail. They are at the vanguard of what vote-by-mail (VBM) proponents hope will become a nationwide movement.

VBM advocates stress that it is easier for voters, allowing them to research the candidates and fill out their ballots at home without the hassle of long lines and feeling rushed by other voters at the polls.

Some have also suggested that voting by mail might help increase voter turnout. That remains an open question, with no consistent evidence so far that voting by mail is drawing large numbers of new voters into civic engagement. Instead, the extra convenience seems to appeal primarily to voters who are already politically engaged.

VBM supporters also say the process is cheaper, since election administrators no longer have to maintain vast networks of precinct-based polls staffed by hundreds of workers and scores of IT professionals. According to estimates, mail-in voting can cut election expenses by 30 to 50 percent.

Wendy Underhill is an elections expert at the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures. She is also a voter in Colorado’s statewide vote-by-mail system.

She says election officials are reaching out to voters in ways they never did with in-person voting.

“My county clerk sends me a text saying: ‘We’ve printed your ballot.’ And then I get a text saying: ‘We put your ballot in the mail today and you should be getting it on Tuesday,” Ms. Underhill says.

“Then a week later, a text arrives: “Have you voted your ballot yet? You still have time,’ ” she says. “Then when my ballot finally got back to them, I got a text saying: ‘Your ballot has been received. Thank you.’ ”

Underhill adds: “I feel connected to my ballot in a way I never did before.”

Voting at the polls

Most US voters still go to a polling place to cast their ballots, either on Election Day or during a period of early voting. The advantage of in-person voting is that ballots are cast in a protected environment where voters are shielded from potential coercion and the process is conducted in a way that most votes are likely to be properly cast and counted.

In contrast, there are a significant number of potentially disqualifying hurdles that apply to absentee ballots.

Like the 55 ballots in Virginia’s 28^th District, absentee ballots sent through the mail depend on the reliability of the US Postal Service. If absentee ballots are lost in the mail or delivered late, they won’t count.

But even if they are received on time, such ballots might be disqualified because the voter forgot to sign the mailing envelope or because officials determine that the voter’s signature wasn’t a close enough match to the signature on file in the voter registration database.

Critics of mail-in voting also raise the specter of fraud.

In-person voter fraud at a polling place is difficult to accomplish and rare, according to election experts. In contrast, absentee voting presents a significantly easier opportunity for someone looking to rig an election.

“It is true there isn’t yet a good case of large-scale fraud where someone got hold of hundreds of thousands of ballots and then cast them on behalf of people who aren’t the actual voters,” says Professor Gaines. “But it is plainly not a desirable situation to have loose ballots that are unaccounted for, in the sense that they are out there and could be cast.”

Roughly 20 percent of the 41.6 million absentee ballots sent out to voters in the 2016 presidential election were never returned. That’s nearly 8.3 million ballots sloshing around in a sea of junk mail during election season. In addition, 583,000 of those ballots were returned to election officials by the Post Office marked as undeliverable.

“It is just creating huge holes in the system everywhere,” says Gentry Lange, a Seattle real estate broker and director of the No Vote By Mail Project.

With such a large number of un-voted ballots, it is remarkable that there aren’t more absentee ballot fraud cases, some experts say. But there are some.

How to fix an election

Among recent examples is one in St. Louis, Mo., where federal agents are investigating suspected fraud related to the 2016 Democratic Primary for the District 78 seat in the state’s General Assembly.

The contest was between incumbent Penny Hubbard and Bruce Franks Jr., a young activist.

Mr. Franks won the votes cast in person at polling locations by 53 percent to 47 percent. But Ms. Hubbard won among absentee ballot voters 78 percent to 22 percent.

Hubbard’s margin of victory was 90 votes. The discrepancy drew the attention of a lawyer for Franks, who challenged the absentee ballots.

The local election board had counted as valid 142 absentee ballots that had not been submitted in sealed envelopes. Sealed envelopes are required under Missouri election law for absentee ballots to be counted as valid. A state judge ruled the board was not authorized to waive the sealed envelope requirement. The judge ordered a new election.

In the resulting special election, Franks won in a landslide with a 1,500-vote margin, garnering 86 percent of votes to 14 percent for Hubbard. The incumbent still won the majority of absentee ballots – 56 percent. But there were only 164 absentee ballots cast.

Other examples of mail-in ballot fraud include:

•  Law enforcement officials in Texas are investigating an individual who allegedly requested and collected several hundred absentee ballots from elderly voters during the 2016 city council election in Dallas.
• Former Eatonville, Fla., Mayor Anthony Grant was convicted of election fraud for coercing voters to cast absentee ballots for him in 2015. He lost the vote among those who voted in person, but won the election with a strong showing among absentee voters, some of whom later testified that he told them to vote for him and stood over them while they filled out their ballots. He was removed from office and sentenced to 400 hours of community service and four years probation.
• In 2013, the former chief of staff to then-Rep. Joe Garcia (D) of Florida pleaded guilty in Miami to involvement in a scheme to use computers to request 1,800 absentee ballots without the voters’ knowledge. In a plea deal, he was sentenced to 90 days in jail and 18 months probation.

Several years ago, Professor Gaines appeared as an expert witness in a local election fraud case in Cairo, Ill. The alleged scam involved paying homeless people and others in the community $5 to vote for a particular candidate for sheriff and county clerk.

“For $5,000 you could turn the election,” Gaines says of the local race.

The fraud backfired because many of the would-be voters were not interested enough to fill out the entire ballot.

“Ordinarily, people who vote on sheriff also vote on state legislators, the US House, and so on,” Gaines says. “These ballots were skipping everything at the top and going straight down to the sheriff and county clerk.”

Although it is unclear how often this type of election fraud takes place, distribution of a large number of absentee ballots makes such scams substantially easier – particularly in local races where a couple hundred votes can swing the outcome.

“It is not a secret ballot,” says Mr. Lange. “If I can show it to my neighbor, if I can show it to my employer, if I can sell it for $10 and sign it, it is no longer a secret ballot.”

In Washington State, Lange notes that every registered voter is sent a ballot, but in some elections only about half of registered voters actually vote.

“You have 50 percent of the ballots just sitting around for anybody to take and do whatever they want,” he says.

Signature verification

The primary check against fraud is matching the ballot signature against the voter’s signature in the registration database. Critics say this process can be easily defeated.

Lange says that as a property manager he has access to a large number of signatures from rent checks and other personal checks. “So if I want to sit there and copy a bunch of signatures onto ballots, there are plenty of ballots floating around to do it,” he says.

Aside from presenting an opportunity for fraud, the signature verification process can also lead to the disenfranchisement of a significant number of legitimate voters with bad or inconsistent penmanship.

Ms. Underhill says her daughter’s mail-in ballot in Colorado was rejected because her ballot signature did not match her signature on file.

The file signature was obtained at a younger age when her daughter was more precise when signing her name, Underhill says. “And then when she voted she used her college-age signature that was all scribbly and didn’t match.”

Unlike many voting jurisdictions, Colorado did not simply toss her ballot out as void. Instead, election officials notified her of the discrepancy and gave her an opportunity to correct the problem so her vote would count.

Election office verification procedures vary greatly among jurisdictions. As a result, so do ballot rejection rates.

For example, in 2016, roughly 9.3 percent of absentee ballots cast in New York State were never counted. Officials in Washington, D.C., on the other hand, rejected only .19 percent. Election officials in Georgia disqualified 6.4 percent of absentee ballots, while Wisconsin officials voided 1 percent.

Some jurisdictions make a concerted effort to prevent absentee voters from being disenfranchised. Others don’t.

In October 2016, one month before the presidential election, a group of lawyers working on behalf of the Democratic Party filed suit in Florida to force the state’s 67 supervisors of elections to notify absentee ballot voters whenever their ballots were rejected because of a perceived signature mismatch.

Under Florida law, voters who forget to sign their absentee ballots must be notified of the oversight and given an opportunity to correct the mistake. But the law did not require similar outreach in cases of mismatched signatures.

“During this election cycle, millions of voters across the state will march happily to their mailbox and attempt to exercise their fundamental right to vote by mailing their vote-by-mail ballot,” US District Judge Mark Walker wrote. “After the election, thousands of those same voters – through no fault of their own, and without any notice or opportunity to cure – will learn that their vote was not counted.”

Three weeks before the November 2016 election, Judge Walker issued an emergency injunction, requiring election officials to give voters with mismatching signatures on absentee ballots a chance to fix the problem.

'It is obscene'

“This court knows disenfranchisement when it sees it, and it is obscene,” he wrote in his order.

Did Judge Walker’s urgent judicial action on the eve of the 2016 presidential election make a difference?

Not much. The judge had noted that 23,000 absentee ballots were rejected four years earlier in the 2012 election. In the 2016 election, with the judge’s order in effect, that number fell to about 22,000 ballots rejected statewide, according to EAC statistics.

More specifically, in the 2012 election, 5,398 ballots were rejected in Florida because of signature mismatches. Following the judge’s order in 2016, 5,537 absentee ballots were rejected for that reason.

Of course, the number of registered voters in Florida had increased, as had the number of absentee ballots being cast. But by the judge’s own standard, thousands of absentee ballot voters are still being disenfranchised across Florida.

After Judge Walker’s injunction, the Florida Legislature amended the state’s election law to require officials to offer voters an opportunity to fix any problem with a ballot signature. It was signed into law June 2.

Florida isn’t the only state grappling with the issue of ballot signatures. A similar lawsuit was filed in California in August to require election officials to notify voters if their vote-by-mail ballots do not include a valid signature.

The suit said 45,000 vote-by-mail ballots weren’t counted in California in the 2016 election because of signature issues.

China Daily/Reuters/File

Rescue workers of a coal mining company take part in an emergency rescue drill in Huaibei, Anhui province, China.

Early last month, Yang Yongsheng arrived in this hardscrabble mining city near the Russian border to look for work. He had fallen on hard times after a bad rice harvest and was eager to get out of farming. A coal miner told him he could make a decent wage in the mines spread out around Shuangyashan. With nothing to lose, Mr. Yang decided to take the man's advice.

He found work, but authorities shut down the mine nine days later – one of the latest causalities in China’s nationwide effort to reduce overcapacity and shore up coal prices. This northeastern province, Heilongjiang, has been among the hardest hit. In 2016, the provincial government said it would close 44 mines in the next three to five years, eliminating tens of thousands of jobs. 

Yang now spends his days wandering the streets in search of whatever work he can find. He’s happy that his wife found a job in a local restaurant, but the $330 it pays per month isn’t nearly enough to support them and their teenage son. On the verge of exhaustion and destitution, Yang is at a loss about what to do. When he thinks about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent promise to make a more prosperous and fairer society, his question is: When will I see it?

“I don’t believe in the Chinese Communist Party,” he says over soup and lamb skewers in a small restaurant beneath a decrepit apartment building. “What they say is different from what I see in reality.”

For the past four decades, the Party’s fate was tied to economic development. Now that the pace has slowed, however, the widening inequality and pervasive corruption that accompanied China’s boom years have emerged as the greatest threats to its legitimacy. At a seminal party meeting in October, Mr. Xi redefined the “principal contradiction” faced by Chinese people as one between people’s desire for a better life and “unbalanced and inadequate development.”

Xie Yujuan/The Christian Science Monitor

A sign at a coal mine in Shuangyashan, China, reads "Deepen reforms to increase efficiency and accelerate the transformation for development." Dozens of coal mines have been closed in the region in recent years.

But the gap between Mr. Xi’s vision of a fairer society and the actual lives of people like Yang is starkly visible in Shuangyashan. The city is a drab assortment of concrete housing blocks, dilapidated storefronts, and rusting factories surrounded by rolling hills and wind-swept fields. It looks forgotten, a relic of the past waiting to be repurposed for an uncertain future.

Many of its residents are losing patience. The city’s economy has slowed to a crawl in recent years as China becomes less reliant on industrial growth. A plunge in coal prices in 2015 only accelerated the collapse of the local coal industry. In March of the following year, thousands of workers took to the streets to protest against a state-owned mining company for unpaid wages.

The protests came and went, but not before sending a signal to Beijing about the risks from social tensions created by decades of rapid and unequal growth. Those risks are something Xi appears to now be taking seriously as he looks for new ways to defend the Party’s image.

“This is a crucial issue for every Chinese person,” says Keegan Elmer, a researcher at China Labour Bulletin, a labor-rights group based in Hong Kong. “They know that inequality is growing day by day and that it's time for the average Chinese person to have a greater slice of the pie.”

Changing jobs and mindsets

Northeastern China presents an especially difficult challenge to Xi’s appeal for a brighter future for every citizen. The region’s three provinces have some of the weakest economies in the country. Collectively known as China’s rust belt, they’ve struggled to overhaul bloated state-owned enterprises and reduce their dependence on coal and steel production. A recently published index measuring Chinese cities’ economic performance provides further evidence of this grim reality. Out of the 226 third-tier cities included in the index, Shuangyashan ranks last. Many other cities in the northeast aren’t far ahead.

The economic decline was on full display at an indoor market in central Shuangyashan in early November. Stall owners complain about having fewer customers. Wholesalers complain about having fewer orders. And Mr. Yin, an affable man in his mid-40s who gave only his surname, tries not to complain about any of it.

“The economy isn’t good and it’s not easy to do business here, but there’s no free lunch,” he says. “If you work hard, you’ll get what you deserve.”

Two years ago, Yin was laid off from a state-owned coal mine. He had worked there for 20 years. In his early days, he never expected to work another job in his life. Coal production was crucial to China’s fast-growing economy. And while market reforms were well underway in much of the south and along the coast, the northeast clung to its socialist ways. State-owned firms still dominated the economy, and many people still believed that working for one of them all but guaranteed an “iron rice bowl” – job security from cradle to grave.

But by 2014, it became clear that the northeast was long overdue for reforms. China’s economy was growing at its slowest rate in a quarter century, weighed down by traditional industrial businesses struggling with excess capacity and dwindling demand. The government soon began to shut down inefficient mines and factories. In February 2016, the Labor Ministry announced plans to lay off 1.8 million steel and coal workers. Worried about their prospects in a bleak job market, workers began to organize strikes and protests across the country.

Authorities have responded to the unrest, including the incident in Shuangyashan, with a heavy hand. They’ve quashed protests and arrested activists. Xi appears willing to do whatever it takes to maintain loyalty to the ruling Communist Party at a time of economic uncertainty. In return, he has promised to lead China toward more balanced development.

“President Xi wants to make a firewall between civil society and the middle class,” says Wu Qiang, a political scientist in Beijing who formerly taught at Tsinghua University. “He sees civil society as a potential challenge to the Communist Party.”

That the party continues to portray itself as a guardian of worker’s rights is an irony not lost on some. As for Yin, who works at a small lunch stall at the market, he says he’s learned a valuable lesson about socialism. All that remains of his iron rice bowl is the roughly $75 stipend he receives every month from the government. In three years, that too will end.

“People’s minds have changed,” Yin says. “You can’t just wait for the government. You need to go out and find work.”

Yet finding a new job is easier said than done for many laid-off state workers, especially as the government encourages investment in high-tech industries unlikely to need their services. Still, Beijing is looking for ways to help as it pushes to reduce surplus industrial capacity while avoiding widespread unrest. Last year, it earmarked about $15 billion for relocating and retraining programs for state workers. Support has also come from outside the country. Earlier this month, Shaungyashan and three other cities in Heilongjiang secured a $310 million loan from the Asian Development Bank to help revitalize their economies.

In spite of such efforts, Fan Xingshen, an 85-year-old retired coal worker, says he sees little hope for Shuangyashan. After two of his sons were laid off from a local coal mine last year, he was happy to see them move south to search for better jobs. One moved to Beijing; the other to the port city of Tianjin.

“The good times are over,” says Mr. Fan, who lives in the sclerosis ward of a state-run hospital, his lungs severely damaged from the 28 years he spent working underground. “There’s nothing the government can do.”

Xie Yujuan contributed to this report.

Courtesy of The New England Council

James T. Brett, President and CEO of The New England Council, recognizes Collette Divitto with the ‘New Englander of the Year’ award.

When Collette Divitto was recently named “New Englander of the Year” in recognition of her advocacy for employment opportunities for people with disabilities, she received a standing ovation from a live audience of 1,700.

The Boston baker with Down syndrome opened her cookie business in November of 2016 and has since sold more than 147,000 cookies. Ms. Divitto is working to grow her business to meet increasing demand, with the goal of hiring 20 employees with disabilities.

In her speech, Divitto, who is in her 20s, thanked her mom for never treating her like she was disabled.

That philosophy – giving people with intellectual disabilities the same opportunities and platforms as others – is what’s behind the growing movement to include the group in higher education. Thanks to changes in the law a decade ago, there are now 264 higher-ed programs nationwide that cater to such students. The employment rate of the graduates is almost triple that of those who didn’t go to college, 45 percent versus 18 percent, according to the Think College National Coordinating Center, a project under the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI). 

“In a lot of ways, this is a civil rights and social justice issue,” says Tom Sannicandro, the director of ICI, which is based at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Children’s Hospital Boston and promotes equality for people with disabilities. “We have a group of people who have been denied access to education essentially forever. Now we are saying ‘these folks need access to education to have the best quality of life they can have.’ ”

The momentum started in 2008, when Congress reauthorized the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA). For the first time, a section was added to address individuals with intellectual disabilities, and allow such students to qualify for Pell Grants, Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and the Federal Work Study Program.

HEOA also established a new grant program to fund programs tailored to college students with intellectual disabilities. While some programs existed before the HEOA update, the grant and the addition to the law are what led to the major expansion of such programs nationwide. 

“We view college as the pathway to employment,” says Debra Hart, the educational coordinator at ICI. She notes that the newest program – launched this school year – is at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. 

Courtesy of ClemsonLIFE

ClemsonLIFE freshman Brittany Kennedy displays her cutting skills in cooking class. The program at Clemson University in South Carolina aims to equip students to live independently upon graduation.

Campus offerings

Divitto, the baker, recently graduated from a program at Clemson University in in Clemson, S.C. ClemsonLIFE, now in its 10th year, aims to teach students with intellectual disabilities the skills necessary to live independently and to obtain and maintain employment when they graduate.

Students live in Clemson residential housing for either two or four years with their peers and are fully assimilated into campus life. Students take ClemsonLIFE courses as well as university courses, which vary by student interests. 

“They have all the same access and opportunities that traditional students would have,” says Erica Walters, the program’s coordinator.

Post-high school transition programs, such as ClemsonLIFE, Ms. Walters says, are necessary to allow individuals with disabilities to have the opportunity to live independently, maintain competitive employment, and be contributing citizens of the community.

At Clemson, courses teach skills that range from time management to cooking to navigating transportation, Walters explains. Additional skills such as filling out job applications and respectfully communicating with a boss are also included.

“They are in class all day, they are working, they are learning through these experiences,” she adds.

ClemsonLIFE students work in a wide range of environments  – wider than some people might expect, Walters says – including retail stores, children’s museums, the food industry, and grocery stores.

A push for more rigorous standards

The Clemson program was modeled after MasonLIFE, a program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., started in 2002. Given its experience, that pioneer program – along with Think College and Stephanie Smith Lee, one of MasonLIFE’s founders – is now in the process of establishing an accreditation standard for similar college offerings.

While each university and college is accredited, the programs are not. The accreditation standard would make sure students reach certain benchmarks and have a sufficient grade point average, or equivalent, so that they are able to make academic progress.

Heidi Graff, the program director of MasonLIFE, says as more programs are established, it’s important to maintain a quality standard. The ultimate goal, she says, isn’t merely recruiting students to be in college. It’s to push them toward academic progress and treat them the same way non-disabled students are treated – something that high schools are wrestling with as well.

“We are hoping that it’ll lead to better standards within our programs,” Dr. Graff says. 

A different model  

In recent years, advocates have found another way to help with college access. In Massachusetts, students get a boost from the Massachusetts Inclusive Concurrent Enrollment Initiative (MAICEI), an initiative housed in the Department of Higher Education. Funded by the Commonwealth since 2007, MAICEI offers grants to college-school partnerships to support eligible public high school students – ages 18-22 – who have intellectual disabilities. As a result, more students have the opportunity to gain experience at a college or university. 

Jessica Vega, a senior from East Boston High School, has been taking classes and engaging with campus life at the University of Massachusetts at Boston since her freshman year. Ms. Vega says she loves to talk to all kinds of people on campus; it has taught her “how to communicate with people, how to learn the environment, and how to behave.”

High schools often segregate students with intellectual disabilities from the rest of the student body. But research shows students are more successful when they are included with their peers, notes Mr. Sannicandro. MAICEI supports that approach by allowing students to go on college campuses to take classes and join clubs with peers of all backgrounds. Currently, 13 universities are participating.

Vega was excited when she learned she was going to college – she says she has always wanted to attend. A few years in, she says college has helped her “get more independent and grown up.”

“Students with intellectual disabilities ... are sometimes perceived and thus treated as perpetual children by those around them, especially when other kids in high school are much younger,” says Paula Sotnik, the project director of the University of Massachusetts at Boston MAICEI. “So this feeling of independence that the college experience offers, especially being around students [of] their own age, is very positive.”

Working as a cashier at Primark, a clothing store in downtown Boston, Vega dreams of becoming a social worker and helping people. She says life is difficult. She understands the arduous journey ahead to become a social worker. But college has showed her “to never give up, to keep going in life.”

Courtesy of ClemsonLIFE

ClemsonLIFE freshman Shaylyn Smith works on her laundry skills during apartment class at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Benefits across campus

On campus, administrators are hopeful about the effects of the programs beyond the undergraduate years.

ClemsonLIFE, for example, has more than 500 volunteers from the traditional student body. Walters can’t hide her enthusiasm when she mentions the inclusive community atmosphere. It’s a win-win to her.

“[W]hen they graduate, when they go out to the real world, they are going to be more open for individuals with intellectual disabilities to work for them, or work with them,” Walters says. “I think that’s going to be an incredible movement that we are going to see in the future.”

Some professors, by having students with intellectual disabilities in their classrooms, are reexamining their teaching approaches to make sure college learning is for everyone, according to Sannicandro.

The conventional view of college, he notes, is that it is for “the most academically gifted, the hardest workers, those are the people that get to the highest level of institutions. And if you don’t have those attributes, you don’t go,” he says. “But we’ve changed the way we are looking at that. We are looking at university and college as an opportunity for growth and learning… We all benefit from [the students’] experience and their worldview when they are better educated.”

Every November, as thousands of Bostonians gather at the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony, they pay homage to a giant spruce shipped from Nova Scotia to Boston Common. At first glance, this year was no different. Under a shower of confetti snowflakes, the crowd sang a rousing chorus of Christmas carols as Santa arrived on stage to help Mayor Marty Walsh officially ring in the holiday season.

Massachusetts has plenty of strong, tall pines growing in its own forests. So why does its capital feature a Canadian behemoth? Simply put, it is a Christmas present. And this year’s 53-foot-tall holiday centerpiece not only brightens the landscape, it shines a sparkly light on a century of friendship between Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia, which sprung from a call for help, and helped solidify a once-faltering international alliance. 

“It costs [Nova Scotia] $180,000 to do this every year,” says John Bacon, author of “The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism.” “They identify the best Christmas tree in the province, often on private property. The owner donates it proudly,” and there is even a tree-cutting ceremony.

The origins of the gift

But why does Boston deserve such an expensive, yearly gift?

On Dec. 6, 1917, two ships collided in the narrows just outside Halifax Harbor. One, the Mont Blanc, was loaded with explosives. The ship caught fire and triggered the worst man-made explosion ever witnessed before the atomic bomb. The force instantly flattened 12,000 buildings, eventually killing some 2,000 people and injuring hundreds more. Soon a heavy snow began to fall with gale force winds.

Massachusetts governor Samuel McCall, who received word of the disaster an hour after the explosion, immediately dispatched a team of first responders. They traveled by train through a blizzard to aid the survivors, blasting their way through 15-foot high snow drifts, arriving even before the trains sent by Toronto and Montreal, recounts Mr. Bacon.

More trains followed in the coming days carrying medical supplies, doctors, and nurses, many of whom stayed through the holiday season to assist with the recovery process.

The third train to arrive in Halifax was funded and dispatched by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston (the publisher of the Monitor). Church members gathered supplies, warm clothing, and other donations to fill a train sent from Bangor to Halifax, says Judy Huenneke, a senior research archivist with the Mary Baker Eddy Library. The church-sponsored train also carried doctors, nurses, and reporters who were all trying to reach Halifax to give aid and spread word of the disaster.

Charles Krupa/AP/File

A worker helps unload the Boston Common Christmas tree, fresh from Canada, off the back of a flatbed trailer in Boston in November 2007.

The recovery efforts launched by Boston quickly spread to include assistance from US cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, and New York, bringing much-needed supplies and nearly $25 million in donations to Halifax.

“Boston’s help inspired the rest of the United States to help,” says Bacon.

Melting animosity

The significance of this friendship extends beyond the two cities, notes Bacon. Since the founding of the US and Canada, relations were sometimes fraught with conflict, and tensions at the time were high. Just a few years earlier in 1911, some in the US Congress talked of annexing Canada, and controversy over trade policy fanned anti-Americanism north of the border. But the immediate response from Boston to the tragedy in Halifax broke down the animosity between the two nations and sparked one of the strongest alliances and trading partnerships in US history.

The citizens of Halifax have never forgotten.

“When the trains finally showed up, going through a blizzard that night, the Canadians, the people in Halifax started crying…. [T]hey could not believe they’d gotten there so fast. They couldn’t believe that it was Boston. Not Montreal or Toronto who got there first,” says Bacon.

The following Christmas, in 1918, as a thank you gift, the province of Nova Scotia sent a Christmas tree to Boston, which was proudly displayed on the Common for all to see.

But it wasn’t a one-time gift. The symbol of thanks and brotherhood was revived in 1971, and has continued every year since.

This year’s special anniversary was dedicated to first responders, both those who served during the Halifax explosion and those who continue to serve in their communities today.

“We will never forget the support the people of Boston and the surrounding area provided,” Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil told the crowd at this year’s tree lighting on Nov. 30. “As a thank you, and to mark our ongoing friendship, we are very pleased once again to give the gift of a beautiful Nova Scotia Christmas tree and celebrate the season in your city.”

Editor's note: Accounts of the number of people injured in the Halifax explosion vary, but this story has been updated to conservatively say that it’s hundreds.  

Damian Dovarganes/AP/File

Participants march against sexual assault and harassment at the #MeToo March in Los Angeles Nov. 12.

The #MeToo movement is sending out ripples of change far beyond its original goal of making public and condemning sexual harassment of women in the workplace.

The spotlight now is turning to the need for equal rights and opportunities in employment, including equal pay. Even talk of reviving the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution has emerged.

This week “E! News” television host Catt Sadler quit her job after learning that cohost Jason Kennedy was earning about twice her salary, despite the two having similar qualifications and experience. Ms. Sadler said she was inspired to take her stand after hearing the experiences women shared through the #MeToo movement.

According to Pew Research figures, in 2016 women on average earned 83 cents for every dollar earned by men. (The gap has narrowed: The figure was 64 cents for women in 1980.)

In an essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Rachel Vogelstein outlines the economic cost worldwide of laws that restrict women’s right to work. 

In 155 countries women face restrictions on working, such as “limitations on property ownership, spousal consent requirements for employment, and laws that prevent them from signing contracts or accessing credit,” she writes. 

While much has been made of the move to allow women in Saudi Arabia to drive, she notes, the same Saudi regime still stops women from opening bank accounts, starting some kinds of businesses, applying for a passport, or traveling outside the country without permission from a male relative, “restrictions that are arguably more significant in limiting their full economic participation than the driving ban,” she says.

In a 2016 poll, 4 out of 5 Americans thought that the Constitution included an amendment that guaranteed equal rights for women. But the effort to enact such a provision stalled four decades ago.

The #MeToo movement may bring the need for an Equal Rights Amendment back into the public conversation, historian Leigh Ann Wheeler wrote recently.

“[D]o American women still need an ERA? In my opinion, yes,” Dr. Wheeler argues. “Today, threats to women’s equality are, in many ways, greater than ever as women confront ongoing and perhaps even increased sexual harassment and assaults on their bodies and rights. An ERA could establish a constitutional foundation for challenging discrimination that threatens women’s health, safety and very lives.”

In the 21st century, a nation's economy can't successful compete if it bars women from full and equal participation in the workplace. 

As #MeToo resonates ever more broadly, it highlights that half of humanity is still waiting for full recognition of their human rights.