August 5, 2026
We believe elections that earn the trust of U.S. citizens as being free, fair, and responsive to voter preferences are the lifeblood of American democracy. And yet, over the past few decades, the fairness of our electoral system has been devastated by a series of developments that have eroded public trust. Both political parties have attempted to exploit flaws in the way that our elections are conducted and that Congressional districts are drawn. In addition, recent Supreme Court decisions have poked gaping holes in our system of voting. The first of these was the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC that removed limits on independent spending on elections by corporations and special interest groups. That decision followed on the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo case, where the Supreme Court ruled that money donated to political campaigns was a form of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, so that the only permissible limit on these contributions was to prevent bribery. These decisions opened the floodgates to immense amounts of money spent by relatively few donors to influence election outcomes.
In addition, over the past few decades the Supreme Court has steadily weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which helped to guarantee the rights of all Americans to vote freely. More recently, in their 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause the Court held that federal judges have no authority to restrict extreme partisan drawing of political districts (colloquially known as “gerrymandering”). Prior to 2026, states tended to redraw political districts every ten years following the decadal U.S. Census. However, this year Donald Trump, facing the possibility of significant Republican losses in the 2026 mid-term elections, called for legislatures in Republican-controlled states to carry out mid-decade redistricting in order to gain additional seats in the House of Representatives. A few Democratic states followed suit. The result has been a “race to the bottom,” with nakedly partisan district lines being applied. In several Southern states the redistricting has been pointedly aimed at limiting the voting power of Black citizens in the wake of the Supreme Court’s most recent narrowing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
No single politician has done more to undermine public trust in U.S. elections than Donald Trump. He has worked exhaustively to convince Americans that our election system is untrustworthy and rigged against him any time he loses. His arguments rest on manufactured and completely unfounded claims that large numbers of non-citizens vote in national elections, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by massive violations of voting and ballot counting, and that mail-in ballots are a major source of voter fraud. Trump has recently called for a number of changes in state electoral policies. Generally speaking, these violate Article I, Section 4, clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution. This clause sets out that individual states have the authority to determine the “Times, Place and Manner” of Congressional elections, subject to the superseding authority of Congress. Nearly all of the changes demanded by Trump violate the spirit of the Elections Clause.
Citizens need to respond to these attacks as they jeopardize the continuing health of American representative democracy. We feel strongly that maintenance of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” requires a set of new Constitutional amendments that would help to guarantee the sanctity and centrality of democratic elections.
Toward this end, we recommend below a set of seven amendments that, taken together, represent a potential national Voter’s Bill of Rights. At present, some U.S. states have their own Voter’s Bill of Rights, but these do not secure elections against the threats revealed during the 21st century. Furthermore, the website thevote.io has previously recommended a Voter’s Bill of Rights that would address some, but not all, of the threats that motivate our selections below. We have tried to craft recommendations that would have a chance of garnering healthy majority support among the voting public. For each recommended amendment we offer a preamble to explain the motivation, while a possible text of the amendment is indicated by italics. The texts are purposely written in everyday, rather than legal, language. The suggestions are intended to start a productive discussion.
At the present time, we expect that our proposed amendments would be strongly opposed by wealthy donors to political campaigns. They would also be opposed by conservative politicians, many of whom believe that they benefit from our flawed election systems. We hope that conservative voters will realize that elections tend to run in cycles. Tactics that favor one particular political party now may well be used by their opponents in the future. So we hope that our proposals will find wide acceptance among public-minded citizens who wish for our elections to be as fair, free, and representative as possible.
- Candidate Qualifications: Donald Trump has led the way among politicians who try to undermine confidence in American elections by claiming that they are rigged whenever the candidate making the claim loses an election. They generally do this in the absence of any convincing evidence of widespread voting irregularities or voter fraud. In addition to the minimal qualifications that have been established for federal elected offices in the U.S. Constitution and by individual states for state elected offices, we would add the following qualification for all elected public offices in the United States, in order to weed out potential candidates who seek to undermine confidence in U.S. elections.
Candidates for any federal or State elected public office in the United States must sign a pledge prior to the election, committing themselves to accept the result of the vote, even if they lose the election. A losing candidate is given a 60-day window following the official declaration of the election winner to contest the outcome in court if they suspect vote irregularities or voter fraud. After courts have adjudicated complaints, the losing candidate must honor their pledge by issuing a public concession. Failure to do so, or the continuation of aspersions cast against the reliability of the election result, will disqualify the candidate permanently from standing for any future public elected office in any State or the federal government.
- Voter Rights: Attempts by political parties to enact legislation to suppress votes from some segments of the population must be prohibited by a clearly worded amendment.
All U.S. citizens of age 18 or higher who are not presently incarcerated for criminal offenses and who are registered to vote in their State of primary residence can vote in any State or federal election available in the State of their registration. If proof of citizenship is required of voters by any State or the federal government, that government is required to first issue suitable citizen identification documentation to every citizen within their jurisdiction. Congress and the States shall not impose any unjustifiable restriction on registration or voting by qualified citizens and shall not impede or intimidate the free exercise of legal voting in any way. Instances of illegal voting can be prosecuted but cannot be used as a pretext to restrict legal voting.
- Congressional Districts: The U.S. Constitution currently leaves it to State governments to apportion Congressional seats. But the Constitution did not mandate single-member Congressional districts and did not foresee the establishment of a two-party political system. A uniform approach for all States to adopt single-member districts was only enacted by Congress in 1967. In such a two-party system with single-member districts, it is inevitable that each party will attempt to draw Congressional districts in such a way that they gain political advantage. That leads inevitably to a federal government that is no longer truly representative of the public, because “safe” seats remain under single party control almost independent of sizable shifts in voter preferences.
The power of unconstrained redistricting to dramatically change the apportionment of Congressional seats even when voter preferences do not change significantly is illustrated in Fig. 1 by North Carolina districts drawn (after the 2000 Census) and applicable for the 2010 election by a Democratic-controlled state legislature and for the 2012 election (after the 2010 Census) by a Republican-controlled state legislature. The latter redistricting shifted the North Carolina Congressional delegation from 7-6 Democratic majority to 9-4 Republican majority, even though the percentages of Democratic and Republican voters in the state changed little from one election to the next. Note that each party included oddly shaped elongated districts, some with weird, small protuberances, that were hardly compact.
In addition to the use of non-compact districts, the favorite tool of state legislators trying to gain partisan advantage is “cracking and packing,” wherein districts are drawn to move minority party voters out of competitive districts and into as few districts as possible. The aim is to minimize competitive districts and make the gap in voting preferences between districts with majority and minority party control as large as possible, so that shifts in overall voter preferences within the state do not alter the apportionment of Congressional seats. Jonathan Mattingly has pointed out that making Congressional apportionment thereby unresponsive to voter preferences poses a grave danger to representative democracy. The path to unrepresentative democracy has been accelerated by the Trump-launched gerrymandering race that has taken place in anticipation of the 2026 midterm elections. Politicians are now choosing their voters rather than voters choosing their political representatives. It is high time for voters to demand serious redistricting reform.
In the 2019 Supreme Court case Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court argued that partisan gerrymandering claims are “political questions” that are beyond the power of federal courts to resolve, because there is no manageable legal standard for federal courts to apply to determine when partisan gerrymandering crosses the line into an unconstitutional violation. It appears to be in neither political party’s interest to pass a law that would provide such a manageable legal standard. Therefore, voters should demand of politicians who request their vote that the politician publicly support a Constitutional amendment to provide such a “manageable legal standard.”
The reforms suggested below are intended to rule out the most egregious examples of gerrymandering by either the creation of extremely elongated, snake-like, or otherwise weirdly shaped districts or “cracking and packing” to minimize competitive districts. The rules suggested below are modest and bipartisan. For example, they do not require strictly proportional representation, as employed in many other democracies, where seats are apportioned to parties in proportion to their statewide vote share. Proportional representation is difficult to implement with single-member districts when partisan preferences vary so strongly with location within states. Rather we adopt a demand for reasonable responsiveness to shifts in voter preference. We suggest implementing such responsiveness by the requirement explained under item (d) below. If that criterion were applied to the 2020-2022 redistricting done after the most recent Census, eight of the states with at least four Congressional districts would have been in violation: Alabama, California, Illinois, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin – currently including two blue states, five red states, and a purple state.
We previously wrote a blog post evaluating various election reform proposals. In that post we listed a number of different methods to ensure that election districts were as fairly divided as possible. In addition to our suggestion below, one could imagine making other rules for drawing electoral boundaries to ensure that Congressional representation is responsive to voter preferences in each state, rather than to the political party that controls state governments.
Congressional districts shall be drawn once (and only once, unless otherwise required by court order) per decade after completion of each new U.S. Census. The districts must be drawn in each State by independent bipartisan commissions that include no current office-holders but include balanced representation of all political parties and of independent voters. The drawing of districts shall be constrained by the following rules:
- The population in each district should fall within ±5% of the average district population for the state.
- Each district must be contiguous.
- Each district must be compact in order to allow adequate representation of local concerns. Compactness will be ensured by requiring that the ratio of each district’s area to the area of the smallest circle that completely circumscribes the district must be no smaller than 0.380. This allows, for example, rectangular districts whose length is up to three times as great as the width.
- Congressional districts must maintain minimal adherence with responsiveness to overall state voter preferences. This adherence requires that states retain some competitive districts via the following procedures:
- Along with each proposed district map, each State must present the probable projected votes for each major political party in each district, based on precinct-by-precinct vote tallies recorded in the most recent Congressional election.
- The most competitive districts according to the projected vote distribution must be susceptible to change majority party if voter preferences in the state shift from the previous to the next election by more than 100%/N, where N is the number of Congressional districts in the State. For example, in a state with 20 districts, if voter preferences shift by 5% in either direction, one should expect at least one of the 20 districts to change majority party. If voter preferences shift by 10%, one should expect at least two of the 20 districts to change majority party.
- This requirement would eliminate most attempts to maximize “safe” seats by “cracking and packing” minority-party voters in the State.
- Minor deviations from these requirements can be approved by courts if the deviations are necessitated by geographic (e.g., intervening bodies of water) or community concerns, but not by political concerns.
- Congress may pass legislation that imposes more stringent, but not less stringent, requirements than the ones outlined here.
- States that willfully violate these restrictions without court approval will be subject to a penalty of the loss of one seat in the House of Representatives.
- Campaign Finance Restrictions: Money is not a form of speech. The strong implication in the guarantee of freedom of speech in the First Amendment is that each citizen of the U.S. has an equal opportunity to express their opinions. Equating money to speech violates this sentiment when wealth in this country is distributed so unequally. The Supreme Court’s decisions, including that in Citizens United v. FEC, have allowed a small number of the wealthiest individuals in the country to dominate financing and advertising for elections, thereby favoring an oligarchy over a representative democracy. The Court has essentially endorsed a principle of “one dollar, one vote.” We maintain that this is diametrically opposed to the principle of “one person, one vote” that would be maintained by this proposed Amendment.
Money is not to be considered a form of speech. Congress may pass legislation to place limits on the annual financial contributions any individual or corporate entity may make to politicians, political parties, political action committees, election committees, and political advertising. Such limits do not violate freedom of speech.
- Restrictions on the Control of Information: Maintenance of democracy requires that citizens have access to information relevant to elections and public policies from a wide variety of independent sources. The current trend for a few of the wealthiest families to consolidate control over many media organizations threatens this access and again favors oligarchy over representative democracy.
No single family or consortium of families or corporation or consortium of corporations or government entity may be allowed to own or control more than 10% of all available media, including social media, that provide citizens with information relevant to elections and public policies.
- Election Day Holiday: Many other countries encourage high voter turnout by holding elections on public holidays, so that voters do not have to skip work obligations to vote. Voter participation in federal elections in the U.S. remains lower than in many other democracies (see Fig. 2).
Election Day, on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November in even-numbered years, when U.S. citizens vote for the offices of President, Vice President, and members of Congress, is hereby declared to be a national public holiday, when employees can take time to vote without losing money from their paychecks.
- Information Requirements for Presidential Candidates: U.S. Presidents exert enormous control over domestic and foreign policy. Voters have the right and the need to know about possible financial interests, family connections, and health conditions that might influence a potential President’s decisions, perhaps in competition with the public interest, before voting in a Presidential election.
All candidates standing for Presidential election must arrange for the public release of the following personal information at least one month prior to Election Day: the preceding five years’ of individual U.S. income tax returns; information about any business involvements in other countries during those preceding five years or in planning stages for the future; complete up-to-date reports on the candidate’s physical and mental health; information about any immediate family concerns that might raise questions about potential conflicts of interest in guiding domestic or foreign policy.
Debunking Denial 