The Expand Democracy 5
Rash governance with winner-take-all / Voting by mail / Virtual legislative participation /Expanding the voting age / Making elections special
Welcome to the third issue of The Expand Democracy 5. As a reminder, each week we bring you five key takeaways on the latest ideas, news, and actions shaping democracy and how to find out more, with topics often defined with:
💡 New Ideas: Bold, innovative solutions that strengthen democracy
🎬 Pro-Democracy in Action: Real-world examples of democratic progress
⚡ The Democracy “Spark”: Capturing both the energy of new ideas and the momentum of action
🏆 Democracy Wins: A clear symbol of achievement and democratic progress
This week, with Eveline Dowling’s help, I zero in on these topics, with a decision to take this edition as a chance to clarify our national challenges that won’t be covered every week, but deserve our attention most every day.
(1) The Trump administration and the dangers of winner-take-all governance
(2) Ideas for addressing low and unrepresentative voter turnout in primaries;
(3) Where the proxy voting debate in Congress might take us;
(4) Energy for expanding the voting age to more Americans;
(5) This year’s special elections - and how to make more elections “special.”
#1. National Threats to Democracy Amidst Rash Governance with Winner-Take-All
Ever since cofounding FairVote in 1992 and throughout my 31 years running it before taking on this new chapter, I have steadfastly sought to work with allies across the political spectrum in service of better elections for all. I’ve worked with minor parties and independents even as they were demonized as “spoilers”, and partnered transparently and in good faith with Republicans and Democrats alike.
But it must be said: what is going on in the White House and Congress is not “normal politics.” Republicans who are enabling authoritarian governance must confront the reality that we are witnessing disruptions of democratic norms not seen in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts.
To monitor anti-democratic actions, Represent.Us has a tracker that is worth bookmarking. Here are two examples from today:
Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice to pursue criminal investigations against two former aides who have criticized him (one for sharing evidence that the 2020 election was not stolen, which is unambiguously true). Here is Politico’s coverage: “The two critics are the latest to be swept up in Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, where he’s sought to use federal powers in unprecedented ways to punish political opponents, law firms, universities and others that he believes have wronged him. A president ordering investigations of specific individuals whom he considers to be his political enemies is a remarkable breach of the traditional wall of separation between the White House and the Justice Department.”
The U.S. House passed the “SAVE Act” along overwhelmingly partisan lines that, as Congressman Jamie Raskin said, “will make it harder for tens of millions of eligible Americans to vote.” Two leading historians put the bill in context: “There’s never been an attack on ‘voting rights out of Congress like this,’ said Alexander Keyssar, a professor of History and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a leading historian of voting rights. ‘It’s always been the federal government trying to keep states in check on voting rights, for the most part.’ Sean Wilentz, a professor of American History at Princeton University, was even blunter. ‘It’s the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history’, Wilentz said. ‘This is an attempt to destroy American democracy as we know it.’” (Note: As reported last month, Trump issued an executive order seeking to achieve these goals without an act of Congress.)
More broadly, the last week of economic turmoil triggered by Trump's erratic tariff policy is based on highly dubious claims of "emergency authority” claimed by Trump repeatedly. Usurping this power has allowed the President to unilaterally raise taxes affecting nearly every American and allow him to help or hurt specific industries and businesses without any transparency. Despite its elevation in the Constitution as the most important branch of government, Congress is flailing in response despite generational risks to the health of the American economy and short-term impacts like consumer prices inflating and retirement accounts shrinking.
The most comparable rash economic policy of the 21st century was Britain’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union. Studies suggest that by 2024, Brexit had cost the UK two million jobs and reduced exports and imports of goods and services by 15%. Brexit was based on a surprise vote of the people in 2016, but that reckless national referendum was done by a Conservative government that, due to the UK’s American-type system of winner-take-all elections, allowed it to govern alone with just 36.9% of the national vote. Governments based either on proportional representation (the norm in the world’s best-established democracies) or meaningful, respected checks-and-balances that curtail what James Madison warned against in the Federalist Papers: extreme factions able to exercise power on their own.
Getting things done fast based on one’s own sense of what’s best is seductive for all sides of the spectrum. But it’s exceptionally risky not to build in brakes to rash decision-making. We are living through a time that makes the vision of Expand Democracy all the more relevant: government is best when democracy is growing. Here are two popular resources that help explain how our Madisonian institutions could be hijacked and barriers to a level playing field that is essentially for sustaining democracy:
Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote Tyranny of the Minority (2024) and How Democracies Die (2018). At an Ash Center event, Levitsky succinctly summarized the US's uniquely anti-majoritarian structures (like the Electoral College, lifetime SCOTUS tenure, malapportionment, and plurality voting)
FairVote senior fellow David Daley has a new piece in The Guardian today. Democrats’ problem isn’t just messaging – it’s the electoral math that runs through the state of those anti-majoritarian structures and how they may exaggerate partisan advantage without structural change.
#2. Voting by Mail among Strategies Addressing Primary Turnout Distortions
The National Vote at Home Institute, the leading resource on voting by mail and policies to make it work, issued a new report on March 31st that focused on voter turnout in primary elections. With more than 80 percent of our elections decided in primaries, primary turnout and voting rules are critical drivers of the politics we experience today. Bracing data in the report include the following, as quoted from the report:
In 2024, the overall turnout for the nation’s 50 regular primary elections was 44 million: 18.5% of eligible voters, or 21% of registered voters.
Nationwide, voters 65 and older voted approximately six times the rate (36%) of the 6% rate among 18-34 registered voters. In 2024, the median age of those who cast regular state primary ballots ranged from a high of age 71 in New Mexico to a low of age 61 in Washington State.
Voters specifically identified [by L2] as “European” (aka “white”) voted at rates between 1.5 and 2x the rate of voters specifically identified in other race/ethnicity categories for each age cohort.
The report shares important data on the starkly positive impact of mailing ballots automatically to registered voters in the mail such that they can vote at home and then drop them off or return them by mail - a “nudge” that is most impactful in local and primary elections. Turnout in the 8 states (counting DC) with this practice was 34% of registered voters as compared to just 19% in states without voting at home.
Resources:
The National Vote at Home Institute’s Policy and Research Guide
The Center for Election Innovation and Research on how voting by mail can be done securely.
Unite America Institute on the impact of primaries and Unite America on New Mexico acting to open its primaries this spring.
[Source: National Vote at Home Issue Primary Election Report]
#3. Looking Past the Congressional Retreat on Proxy Voting 💡
Last week, Cynthia Terrell of RepresentWomen reported in her Weekend Reading column in Ms Magazine on an important pro-democracy development in Congress:
“One of my early insights at RepresentWomen was that policies designed to enable a certain community to participate equitably can be helpful to all of us—from wheelchair ramps to better sound systems in classrooms. A challenge for parents of young children to serve in elected office can be the expectation that parents of young children are expected to participate in evening events in person. That’s hard enough for parents of newborns in Congress who are well-paid; it’s quite another for local officials who are volunteers or poorly paid. The same challenges also apply to people seeking to testify in hearings if not allowed to participate remotely - a restriction we know from our experiences in the pandemic is not necessary.
“An unfolding drama in Congress showcases a particularly sensible idea designed to address this challenge: giving parents of newborns a 12-week period where they can participate and vote remotely. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.), the newest mothers in the House, have co-sponsored a resolution to allow new parents to vote remotely. When House Speaker Mike Johnson sought to bury their bill, they organized a “discharge petition” with the signatures of a majority of House measures to force a floor vote. When Johnson in response this week sought to pass a rule that would block consideration of the bill until 2027, a majority came together to reject Johnson’s proposed rule—and put House business at a standstill.”
Donald Trump endorsed the concept in a conversation with reporters but then backed Mike Johnson’s successful effort to water this proposal down to allow limited uses of “vote pairing.” While Congress won’t consider this issue again before 2027, other elected bodies can act sooner. I would take it further. Requirements that Americans must testify in person curtail participation by many parents and wage workers. We all have experienced how modern technology allows remote participation, and it’s high time to do what we can to open participation in government to all.
Resources:
RepresentWomen resources on state legislative modernization
POPVOX on why proxy voting is important
#4. Expanding Voting Age: From Pipedream to the Inevitable ⚡
One pro-democracy topic we will return to regularly at Expand Democracy is extending suffrage rights to younger citizens. There is a remarkable international movement toward ending prohibitions against 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds from voting, grounded in research that shows this age is conducive for newly entrenched voters exercising their right and evidence of their readiness to vote comparable to other Americans. I helped advocates bring 16-year-old voting to my hometown of Takoma Park (MD) in 2013 - where, when last I looked, more 16- and 17-year-olds had cast ballots than all 18–to 29-year-olds combined. As explained by the Electoral Reform Society, the United Kingdom is poised to extend voting rights to 16-year-olds, with Scotland leading the way in a remarkably unanimous vote of its parliament after a trial use in its 2014 independence referendum.
I recognize the resistance people can have to this change, but it’s a powerful “second look” issue. That is, the more one can look past any immediate concerns, the more the change makes sense. I’m thrilled to see Vote16USA building support for this change around the country. Check out its campaign pages, which are underway in at least 14 states, with innovations including bills to extend voting rights for election to certain offices like local school boards. A less ambitious policy - but one that is immediately sensible and has won landslide approval on the ballot in at least three states, including Iowa last year – is to allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries tied to elections where they will be 18 by the date of the general election, which is now the last in at least 21 states (counting DC).
[Image from the Civics Center]
#5. Texas Special Election Rules Show Promising Reform Path 🎬
Whenever I hear grumbling that the framers of our Constitution did not genuinely support democracy, I emphasize that the Constitution requires the election of everyone who has ever served in the U.S. House of Representatives. House members must face voters every two years, and the House is the only branch of government that can declare war, appropriate money, and initiate impeachments. To be sure, those elections have often fallen short of international standards for healthy democracy, but they must happen.
This right of voters to choose their leaders in the “People’s House” extends to filing vacancies, unlike the constitutional defect that enables many states to allow their governors to fill U.S. Senate vacancies without an election – a power that the recently pardoned former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich used to try to effectively sell the seat to the highest bidder. We’ve already had two congressional vacancies filled by election in Florida this spring, with another coming up in Arizona in September and a fourth in Texas - although in an act of apparent partisanship, not scheduled until November by Texas governor Greg Abbott.
Gov. Abbot’s actions notwithstanding, Texas’ special election law is worth elevating as a best practice. As also done for filling congressional vacancies in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, all candidates run in a single election, regardless of party. If any candidate wins a majority, the vacancy is immediately filled. If not, the top two finishers face off in a runoff election. Louisiana has elected most of its leaders with this system for decades, and it encourages more participation. The biggest downside to Texas’s rules is that, unlike the three other states with this practice, it must delay its runoff for months to give military and overseas voters enough time to vote – Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi provide their overseas voter with ranked choice voting ballots (as done in regularly scheduled election that might go to runoff in those states and in Alabama, Arkansas and South Carolina) that allow for a runoff period of less than a month.
Resources:
Ballotpedia page tracking U.S. House special elections in 2025-2026
Former Rhode Island state legislator David Segal’s New York Times op-ed on the case for U.S. Senate vacancy elections
Unite America Institute report from 2022 on Louisiana’s election system
FairVote on the six states using RCV ballots for overseas voters
Thanks for citing POPVOX Foundation's proxy voting explainer!