Walk onto almost any college campus in March or April and you’ll find the same ritual playing out: student government elections in which half the seats are uncontested, and the other half are dominated by whichever student club, fraternity, sorority, or pre-existing friend group got organized first. Ask a thoughtful, capable sophomore why they didn’t run for student senate and you’ll usually get some version of the same answer: it felt like a closed system, like the outcome was already decided before the race started; like running meant challenging a clique, not making a case to voters.

That’s not a student government problem. That’s a small-scale preview of what a lot of Americans believe about elections generally, and it’s worth taking seriously precisely because it’s small enough to fix.

I’ve spent years thinking about how to get more students into the habit of running, voting, and taking the mechanics of elections seriously. One idea keeps standing out: campuses should adopt Single Transferable Vote — STV — for electing their student governments. It’s not a hypothetical. A meaningful number of schools already use it, including Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and Louisiana State, among others. The pitch to a skeptical student government isn’t “try something exotic.” It’s “you’re behind.”

Single Transferable Vote is a ranked-ballot system built for electing multiple people to one body at once, rather than one person to one office. Voters rank candidates in order of preference; candidates need to clear a set quota of votes to win a seat, and once they clear it, their surplus support flows to voters’ next choices instead of being wasted. Candidates who can’t win are eliminated and their votes transfer too. Some complain that STV is too complex for the typical voter to process, but we rank-order our preferences every day, whether it’s favorite bands, streaming shows, or foods.

Say that a candidate needs 100 votes to qualify to serve. Anyone who couldn’t get to that number after the transfer rounds would be eliminated, and the voters who put eliminated candidates first would have their next-highest preference votes go to another candidate who could still win.

The upshot is that a body elected under STV tends to reflect the actual range of student opinion in the room, instead of handing every seat to whichever bloc turns out its people first.

Capturing the breadth of students’ voices is what makes Single Transferable Vote useful for the candidacy problem specifically. In a winner-take-all student election, running against an entrenched group means betting everything on beating them outright — a discouraging proposition for a first-time candidate with no campaign infrastructure. Under STV, a student doesn’t need to out-organize the dominant clique to win a seat; they need to clear a quota that a fraction of the electorate can meet on its own. That lowers the real cost of entry.

Evidence from cities that use ranked choice voting suggests that more and better candidates emerge with ranked systems. A 2025 study in the American Journal of Political Science examined 273 cities that adopted ranked systems over three decades and found a real increase in the number of candidates running for office after adoption — though the effect faded in later election cycles because the novelty of a new system brings not only more serious candidates into the pool but some less than serious candidates as well. Fairly quickly, a smaller increase in the overall number of candidates stabilizes. That imperfection is a good reminder that voting methods are a structural nudge, not an ultimate fix. There are no voting systems where they can be installed and forgotten about; constant education and reminders are necessary.

The campuses already using Single Transferable Vote offer a useful lesson in structure. Most of them — Carnegie Mellon and UT Austin especially — apportion representation by academic college, at a fixed ratio of students to seats. Individual students then compete for their college’s seats under STV, with no party or clique label attached. UCLA is the interesting exception: its student government has real, functioning “slates” — coalitions like Bruins United, which formed in 2004 out of Greek organizations, religious student groups, and campus political clubs, and has dominated council elections for two decades. The UCLA example shows STV doesn’t automatically dissolve entrenched coalitions. Instead, ranked systems give an outsider a mathematical path to a seat at the decision-making table without having to beat the machine outright.

On the other hand, contrast that with what UC San Diego tried in the spring. Facing the same complaint — student elections feel closed and discouraging — UCSD’s student government rewrote its election code to ban candidates from coordinating with each other at all. The result: a candidate was disqualified for associating with other candidates, a free-speech watchdog group threatened legal action, and an op-ed in the campus newspaper argued the rewrite produced more uncontested races and less trust in the process. UCSD tried to fix a structural problem with a behavioral rule, and it appears to have made the discouragement worse. STV would instead change the math of how votes translate to seats, rather than police how students campaign or engage with each other.

As a civic educator, I’m drawn to another benefit of Single Transferable Vote systems: the moment a student has to rank candidates instead of picking just one, they’re forced to think — even briefly — about the fact that voting methods are a choice, not a law of nature. That’s a small dose of exactly the kind of thinking American democracy needs more of right now. We need an electorate that understands its institutions well enough to ask whether those institutions are serving the goals we actually want, instead of assuming the rules in front of them are the only rules there are. Students can get accustomed to STV in college, and then apply it in the political world beyond. The time has come.

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Chapman Rackaway is the chair of the department of political science at Radford University in Virginia, and a scholar of democratic governance and civic architecture. He has participated in the AASCU American Democracy Project since 2003, chaired the Georgia Caucus of ADP institutions, served two terms as an ADP Civic Fellow, served on the ADP National Steering Committee, and co-produced the ADP Coordinators' Guide, a comprehensive resource that has helped new and restarting ADP chapters across the country build their own programs. At Radford, Chapman leads the Highlanders Vote program.

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We’ve been thrilled to spend the past 52 weeks bringing you news on the important democracy renovation work being done across America and perspectives on what it means to commit to renovation.

Right now, most of America’s politics gets framed as a battle between “populists”—whether of the MAGA or DSA variant—and “moderates.” In this narrative, moderation codes as protecting business-as-usual.

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In 2013, the U.S. Congress had an approval rating of 9 percent. That was my red-alert moment. If only 9 percent of the people approved of our own voice, then our constitutional democracy was fundamentally broken.

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Lots of new educator resources!

The Obama Foundation’s professional development opportunities are designed to empower and connect K-12 educators with stories and case studies of the Obama administration, The Obama Foundation’s practice and commitment to Values-Based Leadership, and the changemakers of all ages who are improving their communities today.

In Pursuit has launched an Educator Hub based on their series about American presidents and first ladies.

The American Democracy Project is running a three-part webinar series on Innovations in Democracy, featuring many of the renovations you’ve read about here:

• Expanding Voter Voice: Does Primary Reform Promote Fairer Representation? Wednesday, Aug. 19 | 1–2 p.m. ET: Explore how innovations such as open primaries and ranked choice voting seek to broaden participation, reduce polarization, and create more representative elections.

• More Voices, Fairer Outcomes? The Promise of Citizen Assemblies, Monday, Sept. 21 | 1–2 p.m. ET: Learn how citizen assemblies bring together everyday people to deliberate on complex issues and build shared understanding through structured dialogue.

• From Input to Influence: How Might Participatory Technology and AI Increase Citizen Voice in Electoral Decision-Making? Thursday, Oct. 15 | 1–2 p.m. ET: Examine how nonpartisan participatory technology and artificial intelligence can help gather, synthesize, and elevate public input to strengthen democratic decision-making.

The National Constitution Center has launched The Civic Decade, a Substack about commemorating the 250th anniversaries of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – Schoolhouse Rock fans, take note of their interview with three women working to preserve the series!

This summer saw lots of great professional development events held by groups like the National Council for History Education, the Foundations of American Civics for Texas Students (FACTS), and the Alliance for Civic Education of Iowa, and institutions like the College of William and Mary and the University of West Florida.

Developing young leaders

• Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out. On All Things Considered, a segment about a student senate composed of 98 students representing 50 states, organized in Boston by the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, AASA (The School Superintendents Association), and Day of AI, a nonprofit launched out of MIT’s RAISE AI literacy initiative. The 74 reports on the same convening: Students Convene to Hammer Out AI Bill of Rights for Schools: Steeped in the technology for nearly four years, teens vote on a detailed proposal that urges schools to embrace AI literacy, fairness and in-person interactions.

• Dreaming of Justice, Living with Purpose: an interview with Generation Citizen and Bismark Ghanney for Nonprofit Quarterly, the first of a series of personal reflections from young people on the experiences that shaped their civic identities—from advocating for change in their schools to engaging local leaders and organizing in their communities.

• Frontline for Freedom Partners Organize Bootcamp to Train Campus Organizers in DC: students from across the country gathered in downtown Washington, DC for a full‑day organizing bootcamp designed to strengthen youth‑led campaigns against authoritarian threats.

• Youth Rewriting Democracy’s Playbook, by Viva Mogi and Frieda Edgette of The Futures Commission for Nonprofit Quarterly.

• Campus Compact is now seeking applications for the 2026 Election Rapid Response Mini-Grant Program. This initiative provides funding of $500 to $5,000 per award to support immediate, high-impact, nonpartisan activities that prepare students and campus communities for purposeful engagement around the 2026 midterm elections. Apply by August 21, 2026.

• Minnesota should let students practice democracy before they turn 18. We could do so by making sure every school board in the state has a student representative. By Aanya Mohta for the Minnesota Star Tribune.

• California lets teens preregister to vote before they’re 18. It doesn’t teach them how. By Conner Huey for CalMatters.

Conversations about civic learning

• Universities Must Start Graduating More Good Citizens, By Anna Saavedra and Peter Levine.

• Can Civic Friendship Save America? By Michael Auslin for Civitas Outlook.

• America at 250: Defining a mature national identity. At 250, America balances universal ideals with the lived stories of its people. By Thomas Kelly for The Fulcrum and the Jack Miller Center.

• Gaming the System: CERL talks with Peter Williamson about how games can be a tool for teaching civics, from Civic Education Research Lab and Paul Sullivan.

• A civic common reading program from Peter Levine, from Thucydides to Pope Leo XIV.

• Judges From Sixth District Courts Convene for Power of Democracy Workshop: Back to School planning includes Outreach Challenge for America250, By Penne Soltysik for the California Courts Newsroom.

• Intergenerational activism: bringing civic engagement to life for high school students through Elders for Sound Voter Democracy. By Laura Brill and Sue Sorensen for The Civics Center.

• Black Philly History, Today: August marks the 130th anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal research on Black Philadelphians. It’s a chance to ask — and answer — hard questions about Philly today, by Sharif El-Mekki for the Philadelphia Citizen about Du Bois’ vision of servant leadership.

Civic learning opportunities

• Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, chair of the National Governors Association (NGA), launched his signature initiative, “Service United,” with $10 million in philanthropic support to kickstart its efforts.

  • The NGA’s Campaign for America will work across party lines to strengthen and restore civic bonds. Modeled upon Maryland’s first-in-the-nation public service year program, the initiative will evaluate, scale and help implement a diverse array of service programs in participating states over the next year.

• Citizens & Scholars has named 35 higher education faculty fellows and 71 teams of Carnegie Young Leaders across 37 states and DC.

• The Library of Congress is offering $100,000 through its Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative for digitally-enabled, creative-arts-driven projects that teach civics and democracy using its primary sources.

• The Supreme Court Historical Society is partnering with Write the World to offer an online civics writing competition for young writers. The competition, open to ages 13-19, is centered on the theme “Justice” and will run from October 5 to October 26, 2026. The competition welcomes creative writing entries (including poetry, fiction, song, playwriting, and other creative forms) between 50 and 1,000 words.

• Founding Forward is hosting student fellows for a four-day “Spirit of America” Youth Leadership Program outside Philadelphia, and offers on-site multi-day seminars for teachers as well – check out their calendar.

Creating democratic classroom communities

• Campus free speech is eroding. How do students feel about it? Navigating civic engagement in a changing landscape for free expression. By Abraham Goldberg and Dena Pastor for State of the Student Vote, about their new article for the International Journal on Responsibility study (with Kayla Dixon), “Fulfilling Higher Education’s Responsibility to Students and Democracy in a Challenging Political Environment.”

  • “We observe that attacks on campus free speech, whether originating from elected bodies or campus administrators themselves, seem to conflict with efforts to promote civic engagement on college campuses.”

• Experiencing Democracy in the Classroom: John Dewey believed the preservation of democracy depended on education. Teachers can show students why our 250-year-old ideals still matter. By Ryan Jung for Education Next.

• Students Decide Whether They Belong Earlier than You Think: Three Research-Informed Ways to Foster Academic Belonging from Day One, by Isis Artzte-Vega for the Norton Learning Blog.

• An Imagining America mini-grant enabled Civic Engagement Centers at Bates, Bowdoin, Carleton, and Macalester to launch the Creating Refuge Collaboratory, where students use creative expression and dialogue to think through political crises and complex social issues.

New publications

• Catalyst: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Service Learning & Community Engagement Inaugural Issue on the theme of Sustaining Civic Joy in Challenging Times, edited by Leslie Garvin. The issue features essays, case studies of community-engaged learning (including a group of programs in Australia), and critical reflections.

• Young People’s Finances and Overall Well-Being Are Key to their Political Engagement: Youth are struggling to make ends meet and have a wide range of needs that can improve their lives and civic participation. By Alberto Medina and Ruby Belle Booth for CIRCLE.

• Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, released two reports:

  • Gen Z Wants to Do Good: How Helping Others Supports Meaning and Wellbeing, in collaboration with Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation.

  • Turning the Tide in 2026: Preparing Students for Lives of Caring and Purpose.

• Renee Guariello Heath, “Reframing civil dialogue in higher education: dialogic praxis as alignment of ethics, communicative practice, and structure” for Frontiers in Communication.

• Can better civics education restore voter dissatisfaction over political corruption? by Tracy DeStazio: Notre Dame scholar Enrique Seira Bejarano and his co-authors are currently conducting research through a multi-country study of the effects of civics education on democratic behaviors, building on their research on attitudes toward government and democratic practices in Mexico.

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Civic learning resources

• iCivics launches Rule Play, a new game that brings the rule of law to life, in partnership with More Perfect.

• Before America, a cinematic documentary series uncovering the Indigenous histories of Michigan, how Anishinaabe nations shaped Great Lakes history and helped spark the chain of events that ultimately pushed the American colonies to declare independence, from WKAR public television.

• Narrowing the gap between research and public dialogue, the Democracy Reform Primer Series responsibly advances conversations and strategy about proposed changes to our political institutions. Launched in 2024 by the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government (CEG), the series is now led in partnership between CEG and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Government and Policy.

• Reclaiming Democracy: A History of Voter Disenfranchisement and the Future of Voter Empowerment, from the Institute for Common Power.

Upcoming Events

1. What Role Does Patriotism Have in Schools? A Webinar from Braver Angels, August 17 from 7-9pm Eastern.

2. The Library of Congress National Book Festival will return on Saturday, Aug. 22. Part of the Library’s celebration of America 250: It’s Your Story, this year’s festival is an invitation to further appreciate the country’s history. At 11am, “How the Founders’ Revolutionary Ideas Emerged” with historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky and Sarah M.S. Pearsall. Livestream and videos will be available on loc.gov/bookfest.

3. Join the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, Campus Compact, the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, and several expert speakers as we break down the current state of nonpartisan student voter mobilization ahead of the 2026 election. Aug 26, 2:30 PM Eastern.

4. Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative info session, August 28, 12:00 PM 12:30 PM. The Collaborative advances community-based global learning and research for more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities through learning tools, Fair Trade Learning principles, and the Global Engagement Survey (GES).

5. This September, Young Invincibles (YI) is bringing hundreds of young leaders from across the country to Washington, D.C. to connect, build skills, and make their voices heard. This year’s agenda is centered on four priorities driving the future of our generation: Right to Learn, Right to Earn, Right to Heal, and Right to Lead. September 9-11.

Fall conferences:

9. American Political Science Association’s 122nd Annual Meeting & Exhibition: “Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild.” September 3 – 6, in Boston, MA. Pre-conference short courses include one hosted by the APSA Working Group on American Civics Undergraduate Course Mandates and another about “Designing Civically Engaged Political Science Pedagogy.”

10. The Skills for America’s Future: A Civics@Work Forum from the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, September 17, 2026, in Washington, D.C. including The Business Case for Civics: Hear how civic literacy, trust, and community engagement contribute to stronger workplaces, economic growth, and a more resilient workforce.

11. Frontiers of Democracy 2026 - “The United States at 250: Meeting the Moment for Democracy, in the US and Around the World” conference at Tufts University, October 2-4.

12. Engagement Scholarship Consortium’s 26th Annual Conference: Changing Lives and Improving Society: Data-Driven Engagement and Innovation, October 7-8, University of Tennessee - Knoxville, Knoxville, Tennessee.

13. International Association for Research on Service-Learning & Community Engagement (IARSLCE) 2026 Conference at Loyola University New Orleans, October 11-13, 2025.

14. Co-Creating Change: Collaborative Community Partnerships. The 2026 Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (SLCE) Conference at American University in Washington D.C., Saturday, October 17, 2026

15. The 2026 Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) Conference: Anchored in Purpose, will be November 8–11, in Houston, TX. The annual CUMU Conference brings us together to explore how urban and metropolitan campuses drive regional development, student success, and community impact.

16. The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) will hold its 2026 conference in Lexington, Kentucky on November 16-17, 2026. NCoC will convene experts and practitioners to explore what it takes to build civic infrastructure with intention and sustained action.

17. 106th NCSS Annual Conference in Chicago, IL, December 4-6, 2026 includes panels on “After the Vote: Civil Discourse on Navigating Division, Rhetoric, and Democratic Outcomes” and “Justice Dialogues: Student-Led Civic Conversations for Social Studies 365.”

It’s time for your Democracy in the States’ Weekly Roundup (a little delayed by Tropical Storm Lala).

Pennsylvania Democrats are pushing a bill to stop corporations from spending in state elections. At the same time, states from Florida to Texas to Alaska to California are debating who gets to vote in primaries and who runs the offices that count the votes. All this is happening as federal courts keep blocking the Justice Department’s push for voter data, and the administration asks the Supreme Court to act quickly on vote-by-mail limits before the midterms.

We’re covering these developments and more state-level changes to primaries, campaign finance, election rules, redistricting, immigration enforcement, and surveillance below.

Reformers Take On Closed Primaries and Dark Money

Florida is one of only 10 states with fully closed primaries, and reform advocates there are trying to open things up this week. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, the focus is on getting corporate money out of elections. Texas, Alaska, and California are all debating who gets to vote in primaries and who runs them. Here’s a quick look at where things stand:

• PENNSYLVANIA: Pa. House Democrats introduce measure to bar corporations from political contributions (Penn Capital-Star).

Rep. Joe Webster’s HB2728 would rewrite Pennsylvania’s corporate charter law so companies have no legal power to spend on elections or ballot questions. Violators would risk losing their charter and facing an attorney general lawsuit. Webster points to the $4 billion in outside spending in the 2024 federal elections as the problem he’s targeting. Hawaii passed similar legislation in May, and Webster says Montana and Minnesota are pursuing comparable bills, though he doesn’t expect this one to reach Gov. Shapiro’s desk until 2027.

• FLORIDA: As voters cast ballots, advocates push to open the state’s closed primary system (Florida Phoenix).

Roughly 4 million Florida voters have no party affiliation, 28% of the electorate, and all of them are locked out of the governor and Senate primaries. Advocacy group Open Primaries is now hunting for a legislative sponsor while weighing a lawsuit. Even Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried is watching the trend. “Every single day, more and more people are registering as independents,” she said. “I think a real conversation needs to happen within our party.”

• TEXAS: New secretary of state will continue to defend Texas’ open primaries against GOP lawsuit (VoteBeat).

Robert Howden, the new secretary of state and a former legislative director for Gov. Greg Abbott, is breaking with his old boss. He’s committing to keep defending the state’s open primary system against a Texas GOP lawsuit that wants to require party registration before voting. “This issue can and will be resolved by the Legislature in the coming months,” Howden said in his court filing.

• MICHIGAN: A ballot fight over corporate money in Michigan politics is coming to voters (Michigan Advance).

The Michiganders for Money Out of Politics ballot measure certified its signatures in July and is now headed for the November ballot. It would bar companies with large state contracts and regulated utilities from political spending and would tighten disclosure rules. Backers say the proposal would affect more than 900 companies, including PACs tied to Blue Cross Blue Shield and DTE Energy, and that 8 in 10 Michiganders support it in early polling.

• ALASKA: Elon Musk is Trying to Kill Alaskan Voting Rights (Independent Voter News).

Musk doesn’t live in or vote in Alaska, but he has routed $1.5 million through a Wisconsin PAC to back a November ballot measure repealing the state’s top-four all-party primary and ranked-choice system. As one attorney pointed out, the only reason the public knows about his spending at all is Alaska’s own dark-money disclosure law.

• CALIFORNIA: California Amendment Introduced to Take Party Politics Out of the Office That Runs Elections (Independent Voter News).

Two Republican assemblymembers introduced ACA 23, which would make California’s secretary of state a nonpartisan office like the state’s judicial and school posts. As the outlet put it, the present setup is like “letting the players of a baseball team officiate the rules of their games.” The amendment faces long odds, needing two-thirds votes in both chambers before voters could weigh in.

Wisconsin’s Primary Delivers Zombie Votes and a Milwaukee Miscount

Wisconsin held its primary this week, and the numbers told a strange story: tens of thousands of so-called “zombie votes,” ballots cast for candidates who had already dropped out, muddied early returns, and a separate tabulation error delayed Milwaukee’s count entirely. Turnout was the more encouraging headline: Minnesota set a record, and Alaska’s new top-four primary system is already reshaping who makes the November ballot. Florida voters are heading to the polls Tuesday, with advance voting already underway, and New Hampshire has new ID rules in place ahead of its own primary next month.

• WISCONSIN: 68,000 ‘Zombie Votes’ Haunted Wisconsin’s Democratic Primary (Independent Voter News).

• WISCONSIN: An election night error overshadowed Milwaukee’s improvements at processing absentee ballots (VoteBeat).

• FLORIDA: Nearly 1.5 million Floridians have voted in advance of Tuesday’s primary elections (Florida Phoenix).

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Absentee ballots for state primary now available; here’s what to know about new ID rules (New Hampshire Bulletin).

• ALASKA: After Alaska’s ‘final four’ primary, a silent primary may decide who’s on the ballot in November (Alaska Beacon).

• MINNESOTA: Minnesota primary breaks turnout record with over 1.1 million ballots cast (Minnesota Reformer).

Missouri’s Redistricting Fight Becomes a Stress Test, and Mississippi Tries Again

Missouri’s redistricting fight is putting the state supreme court’s power to enforce its own rulings to the test. Mississippi is trying again with a map that courts have already flagged as a racial gerrymander. Alabama is moving in the other direction: after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, the state brought back its original 2023 map, which courts had called discriminatory, replacing the court-ordered map that helped elect a Democrat in 2024.

• MISSOURI: Missouri’s redistricting mess is a stress test for the rule of law (Missouri Independent).

• MISSOURI: Judge sets trial date for Missouri redistricting referendum, initiative petition amendment (Missouri Independent).

• MISSISSIPPI: After Supreme Court gutted VRA, Mississippi tries to bring back a GOP gerrymander (Democracy Docket).

• MISSISSIPPI: Federal judge blocks GOP effort to get rid of Black judicial seat in Mississippi (Democracy Docket).

• TEXAS: Texas Supreme Court refuses to stop GOP-led county from changing voting maps between primary and November election (Democracy Docket).

• ALABAMA: Alabama 2nd Congressional District race could have national implications (Alabama Reflector).

Voting, Elections & The Courts

Federal courts kept blocking the Trump administration’s push for supposedly ineligible voters this week. Nevada became the DOJ’s 22nd straight loss, even as the administration asks the Supreme Court to move quickly on vote-by-mail limits before the midterms. Courts also pushed back on federal power in other areas, from homelessness policy to birthright citizenship.

• NEVADA: Trump DOJ goes 0 for 22 as Nevada court rejects voter roll demand (Democracy Docket).

• MICHIGAN: Trump DOJ fails to convince full Sixth Circuit to resurrect Michigan voter roll loss (Democracy Docket).

• ALASKA: Alaska’s list of alleged noncitizen voters includes more Republicans than Democrats (Alaska Beacon).

• NATIONAL: Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide (VoteBeat).

• NATIONAL: Trump administration urges Supreme Court to rule soon on limiting vote-by-mail in midterms (Alabama Reflector).

• TEXAS: Texas’ mail ballot ID requirements restored by federal appeals court (VoteBeat).

• SOUTH DAKOTA: Federal appeals court protects longer petitioning time for South Dakota ballot questions (South Dakota Searchlight).

• MAINE, MARYLAND, and RHODE ISLAND: Federal judge tosses Trump’s latest attempt to reconfigure federal homelessness programs (Maine Morning Star / Maryland Matters / Rhode Island Current).

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Legal groups ask NH court to restore block on Trump order on birthright citizenship (Maine Morning Star).

ICE Expands, and Accountability Catches Up

Private prison companies are still profiting from the immigration enforcement surge, and Kentucky’s new electric shock glove contract shows just how far things have gone. But there was pushback this week too: a court-ordered release in Montana, ACLU data showing a spike in Kentucky detainer requests, advocates tracking detention conditions in Memphis, and states moving hundreds of bills to push back against federal enforcement.

• TENNESSEE: At CoreCivic, immigration crackdowns are good for business (Daily Montanan).

• KENTUCKY: ICE to outfit agents with electric shock gloves from KY company in $20 million no-bid contract (Kentucky Lantern).

• KENTUCKY: ACLU-KY: Data shows 300% increase in ICE detainer requests after Louisville policy change (Kentucky Lantern).

• MICHIGAN: DHS account, court records raise questions about DNR role in ICE arrest (Michigan Advance).

• TENNESSEE: ‘The Bird-Watchers’ of Memphis: tracking ICE flights and documenting detainees in shackles (Arkansas Advocate).

• COLORADO: Health of Colorado priest in ICE custody deteriorating after almost a year in detention (Colorado Newsline).

• NATIONAL: Democrats push nearly 250 state bills opposing federal immigration efforts (Maine Morning Star).

• MONTANA: Federal judge orders release of unlawfully detained Yellowstone County man (Daily Montanan).

• FLORIDA: FIU students file federal lawsuit over ICE protest clampdown (Florida Phoenix).

States Push Back on Surveillance

Flock Safety’s license-plate reader network is under the microscope as state lawmakers worry about mission creep, from immigration enforcement to stalking. States are responding with new safeguards and tougher questions for the company. In Kentucky, the Supreme Court reminded everyone that the Fourth Amendment still applies.

• PENNSYLVANIA: Flock Safety tightens safeguards as states, cities question surveillance network (Alabama Reflector).

• WEST VIRGINIA: ‘Not too reassured’: WV lawmakers unimpressed by Flock rep’s answers to privacy concerns, more (West Virginia Watch).

• NATIONAL: Flock is just the latest example of using surveillance to stalk women (North Carolina Newsline).

• IDAHO: Immigration searches were conducted on Twin Falls Flock network. A month later, agreements changed. (Idaho Capital Sun).

• SOUTH DAKOTA: Attorney general of South Dakota plans to introduce ‘safeguards’ for license plate readers (South Dakota Searchlight).

• KENTUCKY: The Supreme Court has a message for Kentucky on surveillance: Get a warrant (Kentucky Lantern).

• NEW JERSEY: NJ Supreme Court opinion on privacy law seen as win for data brokers (New Jersey Monitor).

The Data Center Fight Reaches the Ballot

Data centers are now a real election issue. Every Ohio governor candidate supports new restrictions, and one Ohio city just got the green light to put a project to voters. States from Kentucky to New Mexico are testing moratoriums as a stopgap while legislatures catch up.

• KENTUCKY: The data center fight in Kentucky is about democracy (Kentucky Lantern).

• KENTUCKY: A county’s data center moratorium doesn’t include a small city considering huge project (Kentucky Lantern).

• OHIO: All candidates for Ohio governor have now called for restrictions on data center boom (Ohio Capital Journal).

• OHIO: Ohio Supreme Court allows Ashville referendum against data center project to move forward (Ohio Capital Journal).

• COLORADO: Local governments in Colorado enact moratoriums on data center development (Colorado Newsline).

• NEW MEXICO: New Mexico Democratic lawmakers discuss possibilities for proposed statewide data center moratorium (Source New Mexico).

Executive Power and Federalism

The federal government’s reach continued extending this week. A top DOJ official got involved in a GOP primary. The administration kept pressuring states on in-state tuition for immigrants, and in Alabama, a civil society watchdog group faced criminal charges a judge refused to dismiss.

• NEW YORK: Attorney General Blanche appears to endorse GOP candidate in latest politicization of DOJ (Democracy Docket).

• NEW YORK, CONNECTICUT, and VERMONT: DOJ targets 3 more states in effort to axe in-state tuition for immigrants (Alabama Reflector).

• CONNECTICUT: Trump administration sues CT over in-state tuition for undocumented students (Rhode Island Current).

• NATIONAL: Governors and lawmakers say they’re getting serious about states’ rights (Kansas Reflector).

• ALABAMA: Federal judge denies Southern Poverty Law Center’s motion to dismiss criminal charges (Alabama Reflector).

In case you missed it…

• Ezra Klein & Danielle Allen on Liberalism and the 21st Century, August 13, 2026

• Renovating America’s Universities, by Danielle Allen, August 11, 2026

• August 10 Tech and Democracy Roundup: KOSA’s Big Week, and America’s Two Playbooks for Protecting Kids Online., by Zachey Kliger, August 10, 2026

• As America Turns 250, We’re Forgetting the Declaration’s Most Fundamental Right, by J. H. Snider, August 8, 2026

“What Is Freedom” was the capacious title given to Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen’s wide-ranging fireside chat at the end of LibCon 2026. As host Shikha Dalmia noted in her introduction, “it is no overstatement to say that [Ezra and Danielle] are the two most formidable liberal thinkers of our time.”

You can watch the video or listen to the fascinating discussion HERE:

Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen on Liberalism and the 21st Century — C-SPAN

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But that’s the wrong question.

Better to separate the questions of message and messenger: to evaluate each on its own terms, then determine a course of action merited by the quality of the message and the ethics and stakes of engaging with the messenger.

First, then, the message. The secretary asked colleges and universities to take up seven themes and declare where they stand in relation to them. They are: Transparency and Merit in Admissions; Free Speech and Open Inquiry; Intellectual Pluralism and Academic Vitality; Affordability, Value, and Student Outcomes; Academic Standards and Rigor in the Age of AI; Safeguarding Research Integrity from Malign Foreign Influence; and Prioritizing American Interests. These are indeed the right seven themes to help higher education reformulate its social contract with the American people, and the secretary posed them in an utterly reasonable manner.

Four of these themes are easy to address and three are hard. The easy ones are: Free Speech and Open Inquiry; Intellectual Pluralism and Academic Vitality; Academic Standards and Rigor in the Age of AI; and Safeguarding Research Integrity from Malign Foreign Influence. These are all areas where colleges and universities are already at work, and where many in higher education share the secretary’s view of the underlying problems, despite generally having different ideological priors.

Already one can identify examples of reform on all four at campuses across the country—the University of Chicago’s long-standing free speech principles; Brigham Young University’s robust engagement around intellectual pluralism and academic vitality, including through a speaker series that brings the whole campus together in the basketball arena and that alternates between secular and faith-based voices; Harvard College’s new policy against grade inflation; and widespread efforts across institutions to guard against malign foreign influence.

But the other three areas are stubborn. It is the rare institution—Arizona State University (ASU) comes to mind—that has made serious progress on these three fronts. ASU’s charter states that the university is “measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” The university assesses institutional quality by broad access and student graduation outcomes rather than selectivity, and it has pioneered programs in partnership with organizations like Starbucks and Uber, meeting students where they are while also maintaining an outstanding honors college within the university.

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But for the most part, selective higher education remains stuck in the paradigm of the 1990s and early 2000s, when universities competed in “top global university” rankings, rapidly raised tuition to shift subsidies from wealthy to poor kids, and stuck middle-class kids with a chronic affordability problem. Although these three hard questions of admissions, affordability, and national interest run against the grain of several decades of practice, they should indeed be forthrightly engaged, as the secretary proposes.

In short, the message in the letter is sound.

But what about the messenger? Here there are four separate questions.

First, if a college or university were to respond to the secretary’s letter, it would find itself following an agenda set by the government. Would that mean giving up the independence and freedom of association that are core rights of civil society?

Second, is the secretary’s lack of ideological alignment with much of the higher ed sector a reason to think that engagement would inevitably compromise the institutions’ commitments and standards?

Third, is the behavior of the Trump administration, regardless of its ideological position, of a kind that makes engagement dangerous and likely to bring harm to the institution engaging? What matters here is not the conservative agenda but the administration’s practices of revenge-seeking, cronyism, lawlessness, whiplash, and disrespect for expertise.

Fourth, given that the administration’s authority will probably diminish after the midterms, would engaging now cede too much ground to a problematic actor of waning importance?

If we walk carefully through each of these questions, we can see a path forward.

On the first question, the answer is simple. Colleges and universities owe answers to an American public that funds them substantially. The Department of Education should be unquestionably recognized as the emissary of the American public, and its reasonable requests for information should be promptly and respectfully answered. Colleges and universities carry a duty of service to the public, which makes communication of the kind requested a part of their jobs.

The answer to the second question is again simple. This nation is composed of people whose views range widely. Set aside the extremes on either end that fail to eschew violence or to respect human rights, and still the variance is great. Precisely because colleges and universities have a responsibility to the entire American public, they owe collaborative conversations about their core functions to people across the ideological spectrum. The secretary is no exception. And to her credit, she has in this letter laid aside ideological division and invited a focus on precisely the issues where cross-cutting agreement already exists. The list of questions is a good starting point for substantive, problem-solving conversations that draw on the work of people with divergent ideological commitments. Ideology provides no good reason to ignore the secretary’s letter.

The third question is the hardest. Do we have an obligation to accord the emissary of the American public unstinting respect when that emissary, or the administration it serves, behaves abusively? How do we protect ourselves from abusive practices? As with any other abusive relationship, boundaries must be drawn and maintained. I’ll turn to how to do that in a moment.

The fourth question yields another simple answer. It turns on the answers to the first three. We owe the emissary of the American people our respect, even if that emissary’s political authority is diminishing. The limit on our respect, it turns out, flows entirely from whether that emissary is behaving abusively.

So we should return to how to set boundaries in the face of abusive behavior.

Colleges and universities should recognize that the fundamental relationship here is between themselves and the American people—not between themselves and the person who happens to be secretary, or even the person who happens to be president.

Colleges and universities should carry the conversation with the American public forward on the seven themes the secretary has outlined — but they should take the reins themselves, while including her in the work. They should not merely answer her questions and post statements on their websites. What if seven institutions now stepped up and, on their own authority, held national summits — one on each of the seven questions? They should of course invite and engage the secretary, but they should also communicate directly with the American public.

Vanderbilt has already modeled this sort of effort with its recent report on the humanities and humanistic social sciences. But the effort should go beyond commissioning reports to hosting large national convenings, with communication and distribution strategies that reach beyond the academic elite to the full American public.

That would locate the driving force in this dynamic where it belongs. America’s colleges and universities should take up the secretary’s letter as their own, expanding it with additional questions where they see fit, but above all leading the American public from the front through this necessary conversation, instead of being pushed from behind into doing what is right.

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Let’s kick things off with 3 big stories:

• The White House finalized its voluntary AI oversight framework, but hasn’t released it publicly. The framework exempts open-weight models entirely, and companies are reportedly encouraged to hold off sharing models until they’re as close to public release as possible. Five Senate Democrats demanded visibility into the framework, and the Foundation for American Innovation filed FOIA requests to force the administration to make it public.

• Illinois passed a landmark social media safety law (more on this below). The Children’s Social Media Act, set to take effect in 2028, will force social media sites to limit addictive design features, including prohibiting sending notifications to minors between 10pm and 7am. It’s the second major tech bill Governor JB Pritzker signed this summer.

• Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear signed an executive order setting new standards for data centers in the state. Developers must submit an energy plan showing they won’t drive up utility bills for residents. The order also gives the state discretion to deny permits for any project judged to negatively affect air quality and water supply.

Now, for our main story, let’s unpack recent developments in the effort to protect kids on social media.

It’s no secret that teen mental health has worsened over the past 15 years. Diagnosed anxiety among all U.S. teens is up 61% since 2016, and more than half of teen girls now report persistent sadness, up from about a third in 2011. Jonathan Haidt has been the most prominent evangelist for the case that social media is the primary culprit for the shift. Others caution against asserting a causal link between social media and declining teen mental health, pointing to factors that rose alongside it. What is clear — from study after study after study — is that excessive screen time and social media use is linked to harm, especially for kids. Lawmakers worldwide have taken note.

Outside the U.S., outright bans are picking up steam. In December, Australia became the first major country to ban under-16s from major platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. France followed in July, and the UK and EU look poised to do the same.

The jury is out on whether bans actually work. A study published this month by Australia’s own internet safety regulator found more than eight in ten Australian teens are still using major social media sites months after the ban took effect.

But it may be a moot point here in the U.S. “There’s no magical birthday when you earn your First Amendment rights,” Jenna Leventoff, Senior Policy Counsel at the ACLU, told The Renovator, adding that minors share largely the same speech and access rights as adults.

Instead, state lawmakers have settled on two broad approaches to social media reform: the “parental consent” model (popular in red states), and the “platform behavior” model (popular in blue states).

Utah pioneered the former approach, passing the nation’s first app store age verification and parental consent law last year. Utah’s law, which inspired similar measures in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, doesn’t target Meta, X, or TikTok directly. Instead, it places the burden on Apple and Google to verify a user’s age when they attempt to download any app and to obtain a parent’s consent before letting a minor proceed. Several other Republican-led states are considering similar bills.

The second approach targets platform behavior. Rather than gating access, laws like the one Illinois just passed place the burden on social media companies to implement design changes to limit features that harm minors, like infinite scrolling, algorithmic feeds, and dark patterns that keep users hooked. California, Maryland, New York, and Colorado have passed similar laws.

Each approach has champions on Capitol Hill. Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) mirrors the red-state model but remains stuck in committee and is highly unlikely to pass this session. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the popular but contested Senate bill that would impose a federal “duty of care” on social media platforms, is much further along. The Senate Commerce Committee voted unanimously last week to advance it, teeing up a full Senate floor vote.

If you’re thinking ‘haven’t we been here before with KOSA’, it’s because we’ve been here before with KOSA. It’s been re-introduced in the Senate every session for the past four years, and was passed in 2024 (in a 91-3 vote) before dying in the House. As described previously in The Renovator, the two chambers remain at odds over the “duty of care” language. House lawmakers worry it’s vague and exposes tech companies to frivolous lawsuits, while Senate supporters say any bill without this provision lacks teeth.

KOSA has fierce advocates and critics in civil society. Child-safety groups like Fairplay and Common Sense Media have backed KOSA since its introduction, and Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media (which Danielle Allen sits on) has made its passage a top priority. “This is a major step toward finally giving families the protections they deserve online,” said Craig Obey, SVP of Federal Affairs at the mental health advocacy group Inseparable, in a statement after last week’s vote.

But privacy and civil-liberties groups like the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation oppose KOSA. “Sponsors say the law is written to regulate design features, but when you dig into it, it still limits the content kids can see online,” Jenna told The Renovator. “Look at how the bill defines design features — things like notifications, or filters that change how your face looks. A lot of that is really just content.” The ACLU raises similar objections to age-verification proposals, arguing the data collection they require creates surveillance risks (they support comprehensive privacy legislation and digital literacy education instead).

The bottom line: states aren’t waiting on Congress — red states have largely pursued age verification, while blue states have focused on platform design. In Washington, KOSA has more momentum than any kids’ safety bill in years. Whether the House and Senate can resolve their “duty of care” standoff is the key question moving forward.

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Here’s What Else is Happening

On the subject of kids’ safety, Courts have had plenty to say of late:

• A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million for creating a ‘public nuisance’ by fueling the state’s youth mental health crisis. The order, which comes after a March verdict ordered the company to pay $375 million, also bars push notifications to minors between 10pm and 7am (akin to the law Illinois just passed).

• A federal judge ruled Meta, Google, and TikTok can’t block California’s social media law (the one mentioned earlier) from restricting algorithmic “For You” feeds for minors.

Federal Agencies

• The FTC announced it will stop enforcing ‘disparate impact’ claims — a legal theory regulators have used to challenge algorithmic bias and discrimination – following a Trump executive order calling for the doctrine’s elimination.

• The FCC banned foreign-made humanoid robots from being sold in the U.S., citing national security risks and the need to shield American robotics firms from Chinese competition.

Congress

• Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) introduced a bill to create a bipartisan federal commission advising Congress on the ethical and human-dignity implications of AI.

• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) unveiled a draft proposal to end existing tax incentives for data centers and create a new excise tax on their construction. The revenue would be directed to workers and communities disrupted by the AI buildout.

• Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas), Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) introduced a bill that would tax large AI companies to fund jobs for workers displaced by automation.

States

It was a mixed bag for states looking to curb prediction markets in their jurisdictions (see the last tech roundup for more on that fight):

• A federal judge blocked Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation prediction-market ban days before it was set to take effect. In response, Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order barring state employees from using insider information for prediction-market bets.

• Days later, a federal judge ruled Utah can enforce its anti-gambling law against Kalshi, rejecting the company’s argument that federal commodities law preempts state authority.

• Oregon Democrats proposed a three-year data center moratorium, joining 15 other states who are weighing similar pauses (New York is the only state to actually pass one).

Influence

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a post denying that his company would like to ban open-weight models, an accusation that has been increasingly levied at the company. Instead, Amodei wrote Anthropic supports chip export controls and mandatory safety testing of all advanced models.

• More than 1,300 employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google signed an open letter calling on the U.S. government to help lead an international effort to build the technical and governance tools to deliberately slow the pace of frontier AI development.

That’s all for now. Have a great week!

The most famous lines of the Declaration are its opening statement of human equality and natural rights: “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” But in the very same sentence lies a much less celebrated clause asserting that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” This principle—known in political theory as constituent power—is the right of the people to rewrite their constitution, even if it means bypassing their rulers. It is the foundation upon which all other political rights are built.

As George Washington warned in his 1796 Farewell Address, “The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and alter their constitutions of government.” This was not a rhetorical flourish; it was a statement of raw institutional realism. A constitution is democratically legitimate only if the people retain the ultimate, nonviolent authority to change it.

Yet today constituent power is the Declaration’s most actively neglected principle, precisely because it poses an existential threat to those who govern. Legislatures have an inherent conflict of interest when altering the document that defines their own powers.

Our right to amend

The American founders understood this tension intimately. They designed our constitutional architecture around the premise that statutory law (ordinary rules passed by politicians) and constitutional law (higher rules governing the politicians themselves) require fundamentally different lawmaking mechanisms, including different types of public voting.

To safeguard against legislative entrenchment, the founders established three distinct types of constituent power: ratification, proposal, and initiation.

We can vote to approve or reject constitutional changes

The first, ratification power, is the authority to approve or reject proposed constitutional changes. Under the U.S. Constitution, this power belongs to the states, not Congress; under most state constitutions, it belongs directly to the people via popular referendum. But ratification alone is a weak shield. If the legislature retains monopoly control over which amendments reach the ballot, it effectively holds a gatekeeping veto over any reform that might threaten its privileges.

We can elect constitutional convention delegates to propose changes

To break this monopoly, the founders provided the second safeguard: proposal power. At the federal level, Article V allows two-thirds of the states to bypass Congress and call a constitutional convention to propose amendments. At the state level, this is achieved through independently elected constitutional conventions that bypass the state legislature. Until the early 20^th century, the primary mechanism to renovate constitutions at the state level was this state constitutional convention process. Andrew McLaughlin, president of the American Historical Association, called such conventions “the greatest institution of government which America has produced.” While the federal convention mechanism has stagnated since 1787, state-level constituent conventions have been convened more than 250 times throughout American history—an average of five per state.

We can vote to hold a constitutional convention in our state, and propose amendments there

The third and most underappreciated safeguard is initiation power, which determines who can set the constitution-making process in motion. In the Declaration, this took the form of a Lockean “right of revolution”—a last resort of political violence. But early Americans quickly recognized the danger of relying on armed rebellion for constitutional renewal. Consequently, they institutionalized peaceful, legal bypass valves. The U.S. Constitution allows the states to initiate constitutional reform.

For state constitutions, fourteen states currently require periodic referendums—usually every 20 years—asking voters directly whether to call a constitutional convention; eighteen states allow citizens to place constitutional initiatives on the ballot through petition.

The ultimate check on any convention is not the delegates, but the people. A convention can only propose reforms; it cannot enact them. Every single proposal must be submitted to a statewide popular vote. To argue that the people cannot be trusted to navigate this process because they will be easily hoodwinked by special-interest ad campaigns is to attack the very premise of constitutional democracy itself.

America’s 250th anniversary should be a prime opportunity to reacquaint the public with this legacy of peaceful legislative bypass. Instead, the opportunity is being squandered. This omission is entirely rational from the perspective of political elites. Governments naturally resist teaching citizens that they possess the authority to alter the constitutional order. Elected officials prefer to cultivate a “sanctimonious reverence” (to borrow Thomas Jefferson’s words) for the Constitution, treating it as an unalterable, sacred text rather than a living instrument of popular control.

In my research, I have found that when the periodic, mandatory convention referendums do appear on state ballots, political elites and their special-interest allies have typically waged highly sophisticated, asymmetrical campaigns to destroy them. The playbook for these campaigns is remarkably consistent across time and space. It relies on a classic case of reverse-accusation politics: accusing convention advocates of their own vices. This argument is a devastatingly effective trap: it uses the public’s existing, justifiable cynicism about politics to convince them to surrender their best constitutional mechanism for fixing it.

Consider Alaska’s 2022 periodic convention referendum. Entrenched interest groups spent almost 100 times as much as supporters to defeat the measure. They flooded the airwaves with terrifying warnings that a convention would be a “playground for wealthy, out-of-state special interests” who would “rewrite the constitution to suit their own agendas.” The supreme irony, of course, was that the “no” campaign itself was funded almost entirely by millions of dollars of dark, out-of-state money channeled through front groups.

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Reclaiming people power

Now is the time for us to make plans to use this forgotten power. Seven convention referendums will be on the ballot during the next four years: Michigan (2026), Connecticut (2028), Hawaii (2028), Illinois (2028), Iowa (2030), Maryland (2030), and Montana (2030).

We should go a step further in reviving constituent power by advocating for a constitutional amendment James Madison proposed on June 8, 1789, as the first of the package of amendments that would eventually become the U.S. Bill of Rights (the bold words are my addition, and I have slightly smoothed over and modernized Madison’s proposed language without changing its meaning):

“That all power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; and that Government is instituted for their benefit, and they have at all times an unalienable and indefeasible right, including initiation, proposal, and ratification power, to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as they may think proper.”

Our democracy is under immense strain, and many of our most persistent failures are structural. We cannot expect a self-interested legislature to propose the independent redistricting commissions, ethics reforms, or electoral changes required to fix our broken institutions. If this semiquincentennial is to be more than a superficial, taxpayer-funded spectacle on a White House lawn, we must remind Americans of their most fundamental right. They are not merely subjects of a constitutional order. They are its authors—and authors always retain the right to revise their work.

J.H. Snider is the author of Periodic State Constitutional Convention Referendums: Their Development Since America’s Founding (Routledge, 2026) and editor of The State Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse.

It’s Friday, August 7, 2026, and time for your Democracy in the States’ Weekly Roundup.

Washington’s fight over control intensified this week. Todd Blanche’s nomination to lead the Justice Department advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote, even as Maine’s Susan Collins broke with Trump to oppose his confirmation, and the price tag for the National Guard’s deployment to Washington, D.C. climbed to $1.4 billion more through 2029. Federal battles over power and accountability escalated this week, and state-level conflicts mirrored that intensity.

We’re covering these developments and more state-level changes to redistricting, primary elections, voter rolls, immigration enforcement, and the data center boom below.

Maryland Sends a Redistricting Rewrite to November Voters While Missouri Blocks a Vote on Its Own

Maryland Democrats used a two-day special session to push through a constitutional amendment rewriting the standards for how the state’s congressional districts are drawn. Missouri Republicans are using different tools to win a redistricting fight of their own: the secretary of state refused to certify a citizen referendum that would have let voters undo the state’s new GOP-drawn map, prompting a lawsuit from the campaign that gathered the signatures.

• MARYLAND: House set to give final approval to redistricting constitutional amendment (Maryland Matters).

• MISSOURI: Missouri redistricting referendum blocked by secretary of state, drawing lawsuit (Missouri Independent).

• MISSOURI: Referendum campaign asks court to block new Missouri map from November election (Missouri Independent).

Five States Open the Midterm Primaries

Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington held primaries on Tuesday. Turnout ran high, a Kansas county’s mail-ballot mistakes drew scrutiny days before voters went to the polls, and Michigan’s marquee Senate primary became national news overnight.

• KANSAS: Wyandotte County mail ballots printed with wrong address, returned to voters after they sent them in (Kansas Reflector).

• ALASKA: Early voting opens for Alaska’s 2026 primary election — here’s what to expect (Alaska Beacon).

• MISSOURI: Missouri turnout could hit 1.4 million as ballot measures drive primary interest (Missouri Independent).

• WASHINGTON: Washington’s Top Two Primary Put Four Independent Veterans in the Parties’ Way (Independent Voter News).

• VIRGINIA: Virginia votes Tuesday: Everything you need to know about the 2026 primary elections (Virginia Mercury).

• SOUTH CAROLINA: US Senate candidate asks judge to put him on special GOP primary ballot (South Carolina Daily Gazette).

• WISCONSIN: Green Bay explains how voters got sent multiple absentee ballots in two straight elections (VoteBeat).

• MICHIGAN: High turnout shaped Michigan primary, boosting El-Sayed and Lawrence to victory (Michigan Advance).

• WISCONSIN: Dane Co. judge says absentee voting system discriminates against people with disabilities (Wisconsin Examiner).

Voting Reforms in View

• NATIONAL: The DNC Insider Leading the Push to Kill Ranked Choice Voting by 2028 (Independent Voter News).

• WISCONSIN: Ranked choice voting would prevent wasted votes in Wisconsin governor primary (FairVote).

• NATIONAL: Party Insiders Just Torched the Biggest Excuse Against Open Primaries (Independent Voter News).

Kansas Voters & Judicial Power

Kansas Republicans spent big to change how the state picks its judges — and lost. Voters rejected a constitutional amendment on judicial selection by a wide margin despite a flood of dark money and a mailer that Kansas Reflector’s own fact-check found misleading. Separately, a Kansas judge used equally blunt language to strike down decades of the state’s abortion restrictions.

• KANSAS: Kansas voters reject constitutional amendment on judicial selection by wide margin (Kansas Reflector).

• KANSAS: Dark money, misleading claims flood Kansas ahead of judicial selection referendum (Kansas Reflector).

• KANSAS: Kansas judge says decision to strike abortion restrictions not ‘even a close call’ (Kansas Reflector).

Voter Rolls Remain a Battleground

Federal pressure on state voter data kept building this week, and pushback intensified as a result. Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states urged the Supreme Court to keep a block on Trump’s executive order targeting mail voting in place, a federal judge separately blocked the administration’s attempt to obtain Colorado’s voter data. Alaska admitted it had erroneously purged hundreds of eligible voters from its own rolls, which caused those voters to lose access until the error was corrected.

• NATIONAL: Democratic state officials urge US Supreme Court to affirm pause on Trump vote-by-mail order (Colorado Newsline).

• NATIONAL: Democrats warn Trump admin against promoting last-minute voter purges as ‘quiet period’ begins (Democracy Docket).

• COLORADO: Trump administration’s attempt to obtain Colorado voter data shut down by federal judge (Colorado Newsline).

• ALASKA: Alaska Division of Elections erroneously removed more than 600 citizens from voter list (Alaska Beacon).

• OKLAHOMA: Flap over noncitizens on state voter rolls seen as unlikely to boost SAVE America Act (Oklahoma Voice).

• PENNSYLVANIA: Pennsylvania asks Trump administration how exactly it identified potential noncitizen voters (Pennsylvania Capital Star).

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Election officials unfazed by Trump administration monitoring primaries in Manchester and Nashua (New Hampshire Bulletin).

• MARYLAND: League of Women Voters, Campaign Legal Center Celebrate Victory as Court Blocks USCIS Rule (Campaign Legal Center).

• NATIONAL: Victory! Nonpartisan Civic Engagement Groups Allowed to Educate and Register New Citizens (Campaign Legal Center).

• NEVADA: Lawmakers eye proposals to shield elections from federal interference, speed up ballot processing (Nevada Current).

• MICHIGAN: Antrim County clerk and her husband cleared of ‘criminal wrongdoing’ in computer case (VoteBeat).

• RHODE ISLAND: Nearly 1 in 5 Rhode Islanders is Latino. The voter rolls haven’t caught up. (Rhode Island Current).

ICE Detention Expands as Legal Access Shrinks

Immigration detention capacity kept growing this week while legal access for detainees kept shrinking. Minnesota will open a new ICE detention center run by CoreCivic later this year, and advocates in Louisiana and Tennessee say ICE broke its own rules by separating nursing mothers from their infants, and a federal contract funding legal help for unaccompanied immigrant children is set to expire nationwide, ending legal support for those children.

• MINNESOTA: ICE, CoreCivic to open Appleton immigrant detention center this year (Minnesota Reformer).

• COLORADO: Colorado inspection law unfairly singles out ICE detention center, operator’s lawyers say (Colorado Newsline).

• LOUISIANA: ICE broke its own rules when it sent a nursing mom to a Louisiana detention center, advocates say (Louisiana Illuminator).

• TENNESSEE: ICE separated nursing mom from infant, toddler in Nashville, against its own rules, advocates say (Tennessee Lookout).

• TENNESSEE: Memphis advocates call on private airport to stop servicing ICE detention flights (Tennessee Lookout).

• MONTANA: Upper Seven Law seeks class action in immigration case (Daily Montanan).

• RHODE ISLAND: Judge orders release of Providence man ICE seeks to deport to Cambodia (Rhode Island Current).

• NATIONAL: Legal services contract expires, and unaccompanied immigrant children face deportation (Louisiana Illuminator).

• NATIONAL: Trump administration rules out mass ICE enforcement at the polls in midterms (Kentucky Lantern).

• NATIONAL: Trump official urges governors to help with immigration arrests of ‘worst of the worst’ (Stateline).

States Grapple With Data Centers, AI, and Surveillance

A boom in data center construction is continuing to drive state action and prompt policy debates. Kentucky’s Louisville mayor and governor responded to the industry’s impact on the power grid and local land use with new regulatory actions. Oregon Democrats proposed a three-year moratorium on new large facilities. North Carolina reporters uncovered a secretive $10 billion deal in a rural county.

Data centers

• KENTUCKY: Louisville mayor calls for a data center moratorium as city considers regulations (Kentucky Lantern).

• KENTUCKY: Beshear issues executive order to protect against ‘harmful impacts’ of data centers (Kentucky Lantern).

• OREGON: Democratic lawmakers propose three-year moratorium on new large data centers in Oregon (Oregon Capital Chronicle).

• NORTH CAROLINA: Inside the secretive deal for a $10 billion data center in rural North Carolina (North Carolina Newsline).

• VIRGINIA: DEQ study throws cold water on data center development east of I-95 (Virginia Mercury).

• LOUISIANA: As Meta data center expands, advocates push harder for transparency (Louisiana Illuminator).

• ALABAMA: Data centers emerge as top Alabama election issue as community concerns grow (Alabama Reflector).

Surveillance and AI

• WEST VIRGINIA: Huntington community organizers start ballot initiative to prohibit Flock cameras (West Virginia Watch).

• MAINE: Local efforts to ban Flock cameras gain steam (Maine Morning Star).

• KANSAS: Kansas lawsuit challenges Wichita law enforcement’s reliance on license plate reader cameras (Kansas Reflector).

• NATIONAL: States begin banning ‘surveillance pricing’ that uses personal data to charge more (Stateline).

• COLORADO: Colorado students want stronger state regulations of AI, social media (Colorado Newsline).

States Draw Lines Against Federal Overreach

Beyond elections and immigration, states are pushing back on federal power this week. North Carolina’s attorney general joined two dozen states suing over new Trump tariffs, Maine’s legal groups backed the state’s refusal to issue covert license plates to federal agents, and New Mexico’s attorney general said the Trump administration wrongly denied his request for fentanyl-trafficking records.

• NORTH CAROLINA: NC Attorney General Jeff Jackson joins two dozen states in lawsuit over new Trump tariffs (North Carolina Newsline).

• MAINE: Maine legal groups back state’s refusal to issue covert license plates to federal agents (Maine Morning Star).

• NEW MEXICO: New Mexico Attorney General Torrez says feds wrongly denied his request for fentanyl records (Source New Mexico).

• NEW MEXICO: NMDOJ says it has recovered $885M through lawsuits against Trump administration (Source New Mexico).

• MARYLAND: Maryland joins two more lawsuits against the Trump administration (Maryland Matters).

In case you missed it…

• People Power, by Micah Weinberg and Angela Glover Blackwell, August 6, 2026

• Reminder: Don’t Miss Today’s Renovator Assembly, by Danielle Allen, August 6, 2026

• Headstrong Club: Live with Julie White on how community colleges are saving democracy, by Joanna Kenty and Julie White, August 5, 2026

• Civic Education News Roundup: Mandates for American history museums and exciting news in higher ed., by Joanna Kenty, August 3, 2026

• Gentle Reminder from Danielle, by Danielle Allen, August 3, 2026

Forty residents selected by public lottery from 20,000 randomly-invited households will serve as delegates to Oakland’s first civic assembly. They reflect the city’s ethnic, racial, age, language, income, and neighborhood diversity. They will gather for three weekends to learn, deliberate, and decide how to turn vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and empty storefronts into vibrant community assets.

They will be paid, because civic labor is labor.

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Oakland is far from the first city to engage residents this way. The idea has taken off in Europe and Latin America, often with transformative results. Ireland tasked randomly selected citizens with developing policy on marriage equality and abortion, then voted on their proposals. Bogotá, Colombia now runs lottery-selected citizens’ assemblies under city decree, and reports implementing most of the proposals from its 2025 assembly on waste and sanitation.

Civic assemblies have been influential in the U.S. too. Oregon has had panels of voters review ballot measures for more than a decade. Petaluma, California, turned the future of its fairgrounds over to randomly selected residents. Deschutes County, Oregon, did the same on youth homelessness.

We believe this work matters far beyond Oakland. The nation needs models that reinvigorate democracy and restore trust — in our leaders and in one another. We need models that lift up facts, promote vigorous public engagement, and produce results that meet the highest standards of human flourishing. We need models that bring together the diversity of our communities in authentic processes that value the wisdom, experience, and contributions of all.

A healthy democracy runs on mutuality and solidarity — an understanding that the wellbeing of any one of us depends on the wellbeing of all. That is the foundation of the civic assembly.

There are challenges, of course, to putting this vision into practice. Here are three things important to getting it right.

First, unleash radical imagination. The civic assembly model engages residents in difficult, often urgent issues that government has failed to solve. It’s tempting to dive straight into the problem. But that traps people inside the constraints they’ve been taught to accept. It invites tweaks to failed policies. So, start somewhere else entirely. Before a single policy option goes on a whiteboard, invite participants to envision the best possibilities for their communities. In your wildest imaginations, what could that abandoned space become? Imagination reflects our deepest desires and unleashes our capacity to think in transformative ways. From there we arrive at bolder, wiser, and more durable answers.

Second, assemble the right partners. A civic assembly needs, well, a village. It needs technical expertise, funding, and the support of trusted leaders from local government and civil society. In Oakland, we began with a steering committee of civic leaders and organizations rooted in the community, with a track record of advocating for those pushed to the margins. This group designed a structure that reflects the community and lets diverse participants make their unique contributions as they influence governance for the whole, while keeping focus on those too often not consulted.

Third, plan for impact. Involve decision makers and the public and keep both informed. Assembly planners need to cultivate trust and support from local officials from the outset. Ongoing, honest communication means recommendations don’t come as a surprise but land on the agenda of enthusiastic allies ready to carry them forward. Broad community outreach and technology that promotes transparency matter too. These efforts pay off when the time comes to get recommendations adopted.

This work must extend well beyond a single assembly or a single city. This year, the PolicyLink Summit convenes under a banner that captures the stakes: We Are the Founders. This generation is not merely defending democracy but authoring its next chapter, redesigning institutions to see everyone’s humanity and deliver for everyone’s thriving. In this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Summit is a reminder that the founding is not a moment. It is an assignment.

The civic assembly is one instrument for doing that assignment. How well it works depends on how intentionally we design it — not just to solve a problem, but to revitalize democracy so it serves us all. An assembly that manages participation rather than unleashing creativity, or produces recommendations that sit on a shelf, betrays both the concept and the labor of those who take part. A hollow process makes the next assembly harder to believe in. The goal is not to bolt a new widget onto a failing machine. It is to model, and then build, a democracy of, by, and for the people.

We are just getting started in Oakland. We invite you to follow what 40 randomly selected residents do with three weekends and a lot of community trust. Then look at your own city and invite residents to step into a new way of thinking: relating to their neighbors, solving hard problems, and shaping the future together.

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Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder in Residence at PolicyLink, host of the Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life podcast, and Professor of Practice at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. Micah Weinberg is a Senior Advisor to the Democracy Policy Initiative at the Goldman School at UC Berkeley and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. You can read more of his writing on the Oakland Civic Assembly on the Assembling Oakland Substack.

Join me this evening (or afternoon for those of you on the West Coast), 7pm ET, Thursday, August 6, to meet fellow Renovators and Lisa Rice, D.C.’s Renovation hero at our August Democracy Renovator Assembly.

Here’s the link to register for/join the zoom gathering:

Democracy’s Colleges

by Julie White

bell hooks wrote: “To be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” That tension is the animating spirit of the work I describe here — the willingness to look honestly at current conditions, to seek solutions for the problems we face, and still to dare to imagine something better.

Much has been written about the loss of public trust in higher education. But consistently, community colleges—which educate over 40% of U.S. undergraduates—are the most trusted sector of higher education. And while we are the least-discussed sector, we are one of the most consistent and important places where the work of renovation happens.

Civic engagement is in our DNA

Civic engagement is central to the history and work of community colleges. The landmark Truman Commission Report of 1947 called for expanding access to the first two years of college for everyone who could benefit, envisioning broad access to higher education as essential to strengthening American democracy. That vision helped earn us the title “Democracy’s Colleges” — reflecting the mission of expanding opportunity, educating for a democratic citizenry, and serving the needs of our local communities. To the Commission, education for democracy should aim to:

• ensure equal liberty, equal justice, and equal opportunity to all;

• enable citizens to influence the forces that strengthen or weaken liberty;

• work across public and private sectors to solve current social problems, and

• aim for international understanding and cooperation.

The Truman Commission’s call to expand community colleges, adult education, and financial aid created continued expansion and transformed college access.

We were developed to democratize higher education, with a focus on local-ness — often starting up in small spaces in community centers and retail stores, and keeping those connections even as our physical campuses grew. And while we are discussed in the media far less than our four-year counterparts, we have long enjoyed a close relationship with the communities we serve. Community colleges remain uniquely positioned to build trust because of our local roots, affordability, and direct engagement with the communities we serve. We are key community anchors in our regions.

Renovation is the work we do every day.

The transformative effect of higher education is personal to me. In my community of origin—the rural Midwest—my family included those who could not read or write, those who never finished high school, those who didn’t trust the people they called “longhairs” (their word for the liberal elite). Yet they built thriving businesses and full lives, amidst generations of limited opportunity.

From those beginnings, I dared to do something far beyond my imagination: pursue a college education. I was able to do so thanks to Rolla M. Malpas—an insurance executive who never finished high school, yet founded a scholarship at DePauw University for low-income students with academic promise. Now I have the great privilege of doing my part to make that possible for more students.

The work of community colleges

Often, when we think of civic engagement in higher education, we think about voting participation efforts. Voting is one important outcome and expression of civic engagement, and in fact, the Higher Education Act requires most colleges and universities to provide voter registration information and forms to students.

But it is not the entirety of civic engagement. Civic engagement develops the knowledge, relationships, skills, and sense of agency that make democratic participation more likely and more effective.

At Pierce College, we’ve built that vision into something concrete: a college where all can Belong, Advance, and Thrive. Because when students know they belong, they advance. When they advance, whole communities thrive. We focus on changing the system rather than blaming the student, thereby unlocking the talent that has always been present in our communities.

We’re proud of the results. Pierce’s Latine/Hispanic and Black students are succeeding at rates 30–50% higher than the state average, and we have eliminated many equity gaps. We are not just closing gaps. We are proving what’s possible when equity isn’t an afterthought — it’s the strategy. If we are to live up to the evolving ideals of democracy, including the “equal liberty, equal justice, and equal opportunity” the Truman Commission called for, then equity is simply democracy’s unfinished business. A democracy that leaves some communities behind isn’t fully democratic. It’s that simple.

Two specific examples illustrate this work at Pierce College..

First, we focus resources on the communities furthest from access. Reviewing our community data, we identified specific zip codes in our service district that we have not served as well as others. These neighborhoods have disproportionately higher numbers of poverty-impacted and ALICE households. (ALICE is a United Way metric that stands for Asset-Limited, Income Constrained, Employed: people who are working, but one emergency away from losing housing, child care, medical care, or other basic needs.) Those same zip codes are disproportionately home to populations less likely to access our college, including Latine/Hispanic, Black/African American, and parenting students. So we’ve built specific outreach, retention, and community engagement strategies to connect with folks right where they are. We want to let them know that we welcome them at Pierce College, and we want their voices in our community.

Second, we build reciprocal partnerships that bring the community to the college and the college to the community. As the Latine/Hispanic population in our county grew, so did the number of these students at the college, so we began building infrastructure to match: campus tours and publications in Spanish, a multilingual stipend for staff so students can learn about college in the language they’re most comfortable in, and professional development to strengthen the culturally responsive skills and knowledge of our faculty and staff. We also built a relationship with the local nonprofit organization serving the Latino and Indigenous Native community. We started slowly, building programming together, with a shared vision of eventually locating a new office for them at our college. They are moving in this month. It’s the first of many partnerships to come as we build out a full Center for Vibrant Inclusive Communities. We envision our campus as a place where students, faculty, staff, and neighbors build civic ties and practice the skills of pluralistic democracy.

While I love celebrating the work happening at Pierce College, it’s important to note that this is the kind of work happening at community colleges across the country – and, in fact, at many regional public colleges and universities. Together, these institutions educate nearly 2/3 of undergraduates in the United States. We must amplify this work and collaborate across sectors, including with private colleges and institutions, to support and expand this work, deeply rooted in community.

The work continues

Community colleges are democracy’s colleges. We were built to bring education to all. With that promise still unfinished, we cannot afford to slow down.

So I take that as a charge: to keep using my voice and my position to defend education as a public good, a democratic right, and our most powerful tool for building a more just society. That’s the work that will help us reach those “imagined possibilities” beyond our current concrete reality.

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I got to put my classics nerd hat on to write a pair of essays for the 25th anniversary of Project Pericles, a liberal arts consortium for civic learning and community engagement in higher education: “Pericles as Founding Father: Democracy from Athens to America” and “A shining city on a hill: The Periclean Golden Age and liberal education.”

In the news:

The results of the Presidential 1776 Award civics competition on the 4th of July are being disputed: Judges accused of denying Sikh student points in national civics contest, by Lauren Lumpkin for the Washington Post.

Political controversy over museum exhibits on American history has also flared recently.

From Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small for The New York Times, Trump Orders Warnings Placed at ‘Inaccurate’ Smithsonian History Museum: President Trump said the signage at the National Museum of American History would correct what a disputed White House report described as “extreme political activism.” This followed contentious Congressional hearings: Smithsonian too focused on ‘oppressors and the oppressed,’ say House Republicans, by Anastasia Tsioulcas for NPR (also covered by Robin Pogrebin for the New York Times and Kelsey Ables for The Atlantic). David Blight, professor of American history at Yale University, made an opening statement in the hearing that you can watch on Youtube. Fox News coverage included an op ed from former White House official Douglas MacKinnon about how “the woke left captured the Smithsonian.”

In Philadelphia, Trump administration replaces Philly President’s House slavery exhibit ‘under the cover of darkness’ after monthslong legal battle. The city and activists have vowed to continue the legal fight to restore the original panels that focused on the nine enslaved people held by George Washington at the site. By Carmen Russell-Sluchansky for WHYY public radio. The upshot? By John Garrison Marks for The Atlantic, “How the Trump Administration Made George Washington an Abolitionist: In Philadelphia, the Park Service now downplays the importance of slavery to understanding the first president.”

Civic learning in the spotlight:

• Doing Civics for Civics – Hill Day 2026, from CivXNow, ​​the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), and iCivics, who visited the Capitol to advocate for federal funding and legislation for civic education.

• We need a Second Founding to build a stronger democracy. Young Americans must lead it. By Yael Bromberg, Esq, and Cornell Williams Brooks for Democracy Docket. Among their recommendations: “Honoring the 250^th, we must pass the Youth Voting Rights Act to fulfill the promise of the 26th Amendment” and “We must embrace American Promise’s efforts to ratify a 28th Amendment to regulate campaign finance, now supported by 25 states. A supermajority of Americans support such a constitutional amendment, notably, across partisan lines.”

• America at 250: Our Classrooms Are Too Quiet. Civics education must recover an essential ingredient for self-governance: respectful disagreement. By David J. Bobb for Education Week.

• This MAGA Influencer Runs a Charity to Teach Kids Civics. Much of the Money Goes to Him Instead. Nick Adams’ Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness has brought in millions in donations and helped him land a State Department appointment, but records show there is almost no indication FLAG was spending that money on its stated mission. By Kali Bomeli for Pro Publica: Pete Hegseth celebrated the registered nonprofit at the National Archives in September, which claimed to have reached 2 million students since 2016.

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Civic engagement in higher ed

Campus Compact launched their new Higher Education Democracy Exchange (HEDEX) platform last week to share programs, data, and practitioner contacts in the field of higher education community engagement, together with partners AAC&U and the UVA Karsh Institute for Democracy.

The American Council of Learned Societies was Awarded a $1 Million Henry Luce Foundation Grant for New Program Supporting Civic Thriving in the United States: The Civic Education for Democratic Life Program Aims to Strengthen Community-Engaged Projects in US Colleges and Universities.

With a $250,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Wesleyan University is expanding its national, nonpartisan initiative, Democracy250, preparing undergraduate students to do the practical work of democracy by supporting the systems that make free and fair elections possible.

Some recent essays on important considerations for higher ed institutions:

• The Case For College Got Too Small: “It turns out there’s something Americans value even more than the economic impact of college: preparing people to be committed citizens, equipped with shared civic values.” By Rajiv Vinnakota for Forbes.

• Academic Civics: What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen of Your University? To safeguard the future of the American university, we need to reconnect with our institutions, and one another. By Adam T. Smith, associate dean and secretary of the faculty at Cornell University and a co-chair of its Committee on the Future of the American University, for Inside Higher Ed.

• We Say We Believe in Free Inquiry—but Our Classrooms Tell a Different Story. If we want to prepare students to participate in American civic life, we need to start teaching differently. By Mella McCormick for Inside Higher Ed.

• A Civic Education That Extends America: Educating the next generation in American civic culture has always been important. Now more than ever, we must extend that promise to all. By Melvin Rogers for Liberalism.org, a response to Civics, Partisanship, and the Academy, by Daniel DiSalvo & Carlo Invernizzi Accetti for National Affair and Higher Education Reform, Civic Thought, and Liberal Education by Peter Berkowitz for Real Clear Education.

Learning from History:

• Want stronger readers? Don’t sideline social studies. By Sarah McGrew, Alison Jovanovic, and Lena Morreale Scott for Maryland Matters.

• From 1776 to Today: Jonathan Turley on America’s Past and Its Path Forward: As part of the Nixon Foundation’s Shaun and Leland Smith Distinguished Speaker Series, Turley discussed his new book Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.

• An Atlanta Museum’s New Look at the Civil War Goes Beyond Relics: The Atlanta History Center replaced an exhibition focused on military history with a reflection of America’s defining conflict. By Rick Rojas for the New York Times.

• Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Jill Lepore and Jon Meacham on Lessons from History: two episodes on the Disrupted Podcast from Connecticut Public Television hosted by Khalilah Brown-Dean.

• From July 12-18, the Military Order of the World Wars (MOWW) welcomed 20 outstanding high school students to Washington, D.C., for the 2026 National Youth Civics Summit (NYCS).

Civic education in the states

• The missing ingredient in civics education is conversation, by Jay Lapeyre for NOLA.com

• Perspective | The unfinished promise: Civic education and the future of American democracy, by Charles Oliver for EdNC: “Many of my students come from communities that have historically had limited political representation. At the beginning of the course, some students feel that politics and government exist far away from their everyday lives. Civic education helps reduce that distance by introducing them to individuals who worked to expand rights and opportunities throughout American history.”

• Guest column: The future of democracy starts in the classroom, by Aruna Patel (Center for Civic Education) and Jennifer Kallenbach, a We the People teacher in Kidder County, North Dakota, for InForum.

• Tech has transformed Missouri. Our teachers’ work remains the same | Opinion By Nacole Boan (Teach For America Missouri) for The Kansas City Star.

• Florida’s Investment in Civic Education is paying off. These Middle Schoolers Prove It. For Florida Daily by Lila Seagle is associate director of the Institute for Governance and Civics (IGC) at Florida State University.

• To strengthen Kansas schools and their students, we can start with civics in the home, by Lindsey Cormack, associate professor of political science at Stevens Institute of Technology, a JMC Scholar, author of “How to Raise a Citizen (And Why It’s Up to You to Do It)”, and host of “Government that Doesn’t Suck.”

• Black Texans consider civics education essential, testing less so: A new survey from Texas Southern University’s Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center found that Black Texans are firmly supportive of civics education in principle, but notably more cautious than white voters when that support is translated into specific policy. By Tannistha Sinha for The Defender.

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New publications

• Portrait of a Citizen: Strategies and Tools for Teaching Action Civics in Grades 6–12. By Darcy Daniels and Denise Furlong for Routledge. Available for pre-order.

• Leading Place-Based Community Engagement Initiatives in Higher Education: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned. Edited By Kent Koth and Erica K. Yamamura for Taylor & Francis. Available for pre-order.

• From the Academy, A Journal of Academic Renewal from the Martin Center put out its Summer 2026 issue devoted to civic education in higher ed, including its history, a look at Schools for Civic Thought, and new paradigms.

Civic learning resources:

• Join the Ballotpedia Volunteer Program: Austin Barraza, Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Diego Mesa College, shared this program recently. In his asynchronous online intro course, he uses the Ballotpedia program (helping to add to their database of contact info and websites for local candidates) as a project-based learning opportunity and asks students to reflect on the experience.

• Civics 101 Refresher Course: Why is Congress the way it is? For New Hampshire Public Radio By Michelle Liu and Julia Barnett.

• I’ve been listening to First America, a podcast about Native American involvement in the American Revolution on the Pushkin network by Rebecca Nagle and featuring leading Native historians. It’s fascinating, sometimes shocking, and very thoughtfully done.

• Speaking of podcasts, The Democracy Group is a hub for podcasts about democracy, civic engagement, and civic education, organized and funded by The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. One of their podcasts, Nancy Bynum’s New Faces of Democracy, featured a program for high school girls called DemocraShe on their latest episode.

• WYFI Indianapolis, an NPR affiliate, has produced a video series called Simple Civics hosted by Professor of Political Science, Dr. Terri Jett.

Upcoming Events:

1. Place-Based Justice Network (PBJN) invites you to join our 2026 Summer Institute: Summer of Solidarity. Join a community of higher education and community practitioners committed to values-driven, justice-centered work to reconnect, learn from one another, and strengthen our capacity to act in solidarity with our communities. August 3, 11, and 19.

2. Andrew Goodman Foundation’s 10th National Civic Leadership Training Summit (NCLTS), a multi-day intensive civic leadership training for the Andrew Goodman Network with an opening ceremony and movie night open to the public. August 4-6 on Zoom.

3. Gen AI in the Classroom: Tips for Engaging Students in AI Classroom Policy, UC Davis Digital Divestment Roundtable led by Marguerite Mayhall (Kean University) and Ashwin Vaidya (Montclair State University), August 13 at 1pm Eastern.

4. From the Center for Civic Education, “A little-known provision of the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect representative government by reducing a state’s right to full representation in Congress if it denied citizens the right to vote. Yet for more than 150 years, Section Two has remained largely dormant, raising enduring questions about constitutional enforcement, democratic participation, and the relationship between constitutional text and political will. In this special program, filmmaker Todd Drezner and attorney Jared Pettinato discuss Fourteen Section Two, a documentary-in-progress following an effort to revive this overlooked constitutional mechanism.” August 18, 7pm Eastern.

5. Faith, Freedom, and the Classroom: Navigating the First Amendment and Religious Literacy, an online workshop from the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) and the National Constitution Center (NCC), August 25, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST

Fall conferences:

6. American Political Science Association’s 122nd Annual Meeting & Exhibition: “Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild.” September 3 – 6, in Boston, MA. Pre-conference short courses include one hosted by the APSA Working Group on American Civics Undergraduate Course Mandates and another about “Designing Civically Engaged Political Science Pedagogy.”

7. Frontiers of Democracy 2026 - “The United States at 250: Meeting the Moment for Democracy, in the US and Around the World” conference at Tufts University, October 2-4.

8. International Association for Research on Service-Learning & Community Engagement (IARSLCE) 2026 Conference at Loyola University New Orleans, October 11-13, 2025.

9. Co-Creating Change: Collaborative Community Partnerships. The 2026 Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (SLCE) Conference at American University in Washington D.C., Saturday, October 17, 2026

10. The 2026 Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) Conference: Anchored in Purpose, will be November 8–11, in Houston, TX. The annual CUMU Conference brings us together to explore how urban and metropolitan campuses drive regional development, student success, and community impact.

11. The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) will hold its 2026 conference in Lexington, Kentucky on November 16-17, 2026. NCoC will convene experts and practitioners to explore what it takes to build civic infrastructure with intention and sustained action.

12. 106th National Council on Social Studies Annual Conference in Chicago, IL, December 4-6, 2026 includes panels on “After the Vote: Civil Discourse on Navigating Division, Rhetoric, and Democratic Outcomes” and “Justice Dialogues: Student-Led Civic Conversations for Social Studies 365.”

Friends,

I hope you saw my column a few weeks ago about Lisa Rice, who is responsible for winning Ranked Choice Voting and Semi-open primaries in Washington D.C. Lisa changed her registration from Democrat to Independent after the 2016 election, and soon discovered that her rejection of parties also meant she had lost her right to vote in the only consequential elections in D.C.—the party primaries. Her exclusion fueled a reform vision, and her creativity and dedication yielded victory. Lisa is one of my personal democracy renovation heroes, and I’m thrilled that she will join us for our next Renovator Assembly, this Thursday, August 6th, at 7pm ET. Our Assemblies are a lot of fun. We start with get-to-know you break-out groups so that members can meet some new folks with shared interests; then we hear from our guest for about ten minutes; then we go back into break-out groups to discuss a prompt or two provided by our guest. The goal of the prompts is to help us all learn more about what it takes to build resilience for democracy renovation and to help us bring the path to victory into sharper focus. Our future, healthy country is already visible in Lisa’s story. All we have to do is listen, learn, and join in.

To join, please use this Zoom meeting registration link:

For the second straight year, Pew Research’s annual survey found Americans rank the role of money in politics as the biggest problem facing the nation — well above inflation, the deficit, gun violence, and immigration.

Who can blame us? In the 2024 election, 300 billionaire families accounted for 19% of all federal campaign contributions, and 100 donors provided 67% of all Super PAC money. The 2026 Midterms are projected to be the most expensive political ad cycle in American history (presidential years included), with Elon Musk planning to spend at least $100 million to help Republicans.

It wasn’t always this way. In 1976, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford financed their presidential campaigns almost entirely through public grants. That same year, the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo ruling declared individual political spending protected speech. Outside spending climbed steadily for decades until 2010, when Citizens United extended that same protection to corporations, ushering in the Super PAC era. Today, dark money in federal elections tops $1.9 billion.

Since Citizens United, lawmakers of both parties have introduced dozens of bills to curb money in politics. Some target corporate spending, others foreign donations, dark money, or disclosure requirements. None have become law.

Cities and states have experimented with public financing of elections to help level the playing field. Seattle pioneered a democracy voucher program in 2017, which Oakland adopted in 2022. Denver, Montgomery County, Maryland and Los Angeles are among several cities running public matching-fund programs, while more than a dozen states run similar statewide systems.

But direct restrictions on spending have had a rockier path. Fourteen states have tried and failed to enact laws curbing outside election spending. In May, Hawaii broke through, becoming the first to bar corporations from spending on statewide elections outright. The law already faces a federal lawsuit, and Hawaii’s own attorney general warns it will be difficult to defend in court.

There’s the rub: so long as Citizens United stands, any state or city trying to cap outside spending faces the threat of legal action. That recognition moved Jeff Clements in 2016 to found American Promise, a nonprofit whose sole mission is ratifying the nation’s 28th Amendment, the For Our Freedom Amendment, which would empower state and federal lawmakers to regulate campaign spending.

Of course, passing a constitutional amendment is no small feat. You need three-fourths of state legislatures (38) to ratify the amendment, and two-thirds of both the House (290 members) and Senate (67 senators) to approve it.

But American Promise is chipping away. This spring, the group’s efforts helped make Oklahoma and Idaho the 24^th and 25^th states to pass resolutions supporting the For Our Freedom Amendment, or a similar amendment.

While they devote most of their resources to state-level campaigns, American Promise maintains an active presence on Capitol Hill. In June, Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.) introduced a version of their amendment in the House.

Brian Boyle, American Promise’s Chief Program Officer and General Counsel, spoke to me from the Hill last week about the recent wins in Idaho and Oklahoma, how American Promise has won over skeptical lawmakers, and the single biggest obstacle standing between the For Our Freedom Amendment and ratification.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ZK: What does American Promise’s role actually look like on the ground in a state like Idaho or Oklahoma? Are you recruiting sponsors, building coalitions, doing direct advocacy — what’s the playbook?

BB: When American Promise thinks about how we engage in a state, a lot of it flows directly back to what it actually takes to amend the Constitution. We need two-thirds of Congress in both chambers to propose an amendment, and then 38 states to ratify it. One of the things we’ve found effective in demonstrating to Congress that there’s real appetite for a constitutional amendment is when state legislatures go on record calling on Congress to propose one.

We don’t swoop into a state and say, “here’s what you need to do, here’s what the resolution should say.” Instead, we try to pay attention to what’s already happening on the ground — what’s making the issue of money in politics salient for people in that state — and try to be responsive and good listeners. That’s step one: being good listeners to folks in the state, and to state legislators, about their own concerns around money in politics. We’re not there to prescribe a solution.

In Idaho, there’d been a real rise in out-of-state dark money pouring into what used to be low-dollar, sleepy state legislative races. You see the same dynamic in Oklahoma. Once we explain that their ability to address this has been constrained — essentially handcuffed — by the Supreme Court taking over this area of policy, it actually becomes not a hard sell to say: one very clear thing you can do is call on Congress to start working on an amendment.

What happens next is really driven by who the legislative champions end up being. If a legislator feels passionate and wants to be a sponsor or co-lead sponsor, we follow their lead on what would be helpful — in-person meetings to talk through how the amendment would work, answering questions, sometimes sending an expert to testify at a committee hearing if that’s useful. It’s not one-size-fits-all. It really depends on the climate in a given statehouse and what the legislators leading it need from us.

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ZK: The Oklahoma and Idaho resolutions passed with near unanimous support. But I imagine it wasn’t a straight line — what obstacles came up along the way?

BB: Sometimes the obstacle is purely timing. In Oklahoma, the House passed the resolution one year, and we simply ran out of time in the Senate — it had to get picked back up the following year. A lot of states have legislative sessions that only run a few months, say January to April, so if you don’t get your business done in that window, you get timed out. In Idaho, by contrast, money in politics had become top of mind for legislators well before the session even opened — leadership was already talking about it in November and December — so we were part of that conversation early enough that the calendar wasn’t as much of an obstacle.

In terms of actual arguments, most of what we deal with is explaining how our proposed amendment differs from other versions lawmakers may have heard about. There have been proposed constitutional amendments addressing money in politics going back to the 1980s, and some of them get very prescriptive — actually trying to write specific campaign finance policy into the Constitution, or overturn a specific Supreme Court holding, like saying corporations have no constitutional rights, full stop. We make sure lawmakers understand our version isn’t prescriptive in that way. It focuses purely on the structural question: who should be deciding campaign finance policy — elected lawmakers, or judges? When we frame it as “we just want it to be you, the elected lawmakers,” that tends to land.

ZK: When there’s still pushback, is it usually First Amendment concerns, or something else?

BB: Actually, lawmakers pretty quickly understand that we’re not saying “you can’t decide, in your own judgment, to give money the same kind of protection you’d give pure speech.” Our point is: you as the policymaker may have very good reasons to want spending by people or entities to be unencumbered, and there’s probably a rich First Amendment argument to be made for that. We’re just saying you’re just as capable of working through that as judges are — so why let the courts do all of that work and take that tool out of your hands?

So the free speech argument isn’t the pushback we encounter most. What comes up more is in states with very strong one-party dominance — the minority party will sometimes ask whether, if this authority goes back to elected policymakers as the main decision-makers, they’d be at a disadvantage. So we do get those kinds of questions.

ZK: A constitutional amendment requires both two-thirds of Congress and 38 states to ratify. How does American Promise think about those two tracks — are you pursuing them in parallel?

BB: Let me back up for a second, because there are actually two steps, and each step has two possible pathways. Step one is proposal of the amendment’s language — that can happen through two-thirds of Congress, which is how all 27 amendments to date have been proposed, or through a convention of states, which has never actually happened. Our strategy is proposal by Congress. Step two is ratification, which can happen either through three-quarters of state legislatures, or through ratifying conventions in three-quarters of the states — that’s only happened once, for the 21st Amendment. Our strategy is ratification by state legislatures, since that’s the method that’s actually been used successfully.

In terms of how that feeds into our strategy: when states take action showing their appetite for an amendment, that demonstrates constituent pressure and state lawmaker support, which genuinely informs the conversations happening on Capitol Hill. But there’s also a separate, practical need — you need 38 states to actually be in a position of awareness and readiness to ratify once an amendment comes back to them. So the work at the state level serves both purposes: building pressure on Congress now, and preparing states for the ratification process later.

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ZK: What states are next on American Promise’s radar? Idaho’s press materials mentioned over a dozen states actively considering similar resolutions.

BB: For 2027, we’re still figuring out where it makes sense to re-up efforts, but I can share a few states where at least one chamber has already voted in favor:

• Wyoming — the Senate voted in favor; we ran out of time to get it taken up in the House.

• Indiana — the Senate voted in favor overwhelmingly; we’d look to pursue something in the House next.

• Arizona — the Senate voted in favor overwhelmingly, same situation.

• Missouri — the House passed it unanimously, but the legislative session wrapped up in early May before the Senate could take it up.

None of these were voted down in the other chamber — they just didn’t get taken up in time. So we’re optimistic there’s broad support to build on in a new session.

ZK: If you could wave a magic wand and remove any obstacle, recruit any ally — what’s the one thing standing between where American Promise is today and getting this across the finish line nationally?

BB: This might be a surprising answer. I think there’s a real skepticism, especially among what you might call “the thinking class,” about whether the Constitution is even amendable anymore. If we could normalize the idea that the amendment process is actually viable, that would help more than almost anything else.

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Join us for the next Renovator Assembly, a conversation for paid subscribers on Thursday, August 6, at 7 p.m. ET, with Lisa Rice. Lisa founded Make All Votes Count DC and led the campaign that passed semi-open primaries and ranked-choice voting with nearly 73 percent of the vote in November 2024. Then she kept going — building Grow Democracy DC to fight the litigation and the recalcitrant City Council through implementation, winning the Council’s reversal on semi-open primaries just last month. She’ll talk with us about how her organization pulled off major change against entrenched opposition, where she found the resilience to sustain it, and what comes next.

Paid subscribers can find the Zoom registration link below.

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It’s Friday, July 31, 2026, and time for your Democracy in the States’ Weekly Roundup.

Three months after a gunman disrupted the original event, Trump returned to the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner Friday night for an insult-filled speech, taking aim at journalists including CNN’s Kaitlan Collins even as the Justice Department had withdrawn its subpoenas against New York Times reporters just a day earlier. Outgoing White House Correspondents’ Association president Weijia Jiang framed the evening as “a celebration of a free press and the vital role of journalism in our democracy.” While the term “celebration” seems like a stretch, the dinner did provide a timely reminder of the important work our key institutions are doing to protect our systems of government.

Which is a fitting frame for the same pattern playing out in the states this week, as Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding voter roll data even as courts kept ruling against it, and the administration took its fight against mail voting all the way to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.

We’re covering these developments and more state-level changes to mail voting, voter data, election reform, immigration enforcement, campus governance, and the data center boom below.

Trump Takes Mail Ballots to the Supreme Court

The fight over mail voting reached the Supreme Court’s shadow docket this week. After losing in federal appeals court, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to let the president’s executive order restricting vote-by-mail take effect while litigation continues. At least a dozen Republican-led states have since joined that request. In a separate, state-level case, Kansas’s Supreme Court declined to intervene in a fight over the state’s own mail-ballot grace period, leaving a lower-court win for voters in place, and Iowa Republicans pushed their own effort to make it easier to reject absentee ballots.

• NATIONAL: After losing in appeals court, Trump asks Supreme Court to uphold his order targeting mail-in voting (Nevada Current).

• NATIONAL: GOP states join DOJ in asking Supreme Court to let Trump block some mail ballots (Democracy Docket).

• KANSAS: Kansas Supreme Court declines to take emergency appeal of election law (Kansas Reflector).

• IOWA: Republican lawsuit renews Iowa battle over absentee voter verification (Des Moines Register).

The Fight to Open Primaries

Independent Voter News provides an update on lawsuits moving in eight states, questioning whether independent voters can be barred from primary elections. Meanwhile, New York voters are pushing to open up Albany’s closed primaries, and military veterans in South Carolina are defending the state’s open-primary system in court. And, if this topic matters to you, don’t miss the next Renovator Assembly, a conversation for paid subscribers on Thursday, August 6, at 7 p.m. ET, with Lisa Rice. Details below!

• NATIONAL: The Supreme Court will Need to Answer this Question, Sometime Soon (Independent Voter News).

• NEW YORK: New Yorkers Say Albany Is Broken — and Want Open Primaries and Fairer Ballot Access (Independent Voter News).

• SOUTH CAROLINA: Veterans Step Into South Carolina Open-Primary Lawsuit to Defend Voters’ Freedom to Participate (Veterans for All Voters).

DOJ’s Voter Roll Purge Keeps Hitting Dead Ends

Trump’s Justice Department continued demanding states hand over sensitive voter data this week even as his use of that data is further called into question. VoteBeat traced the number Trump has been stating (250,000 noncitizens supposedly registered) and noted serious flaws showing that the number “will absolutely fall apart under any scrutiny.” A federal judge separately dismissed DOJ’s lawsuit seeking New Jersey’s voter rolls, while California and Pennsylvania pushed back on the underlying data. In North Carolina, meanwhile, the state Senate advanced its own elections bill that would shrink early voting and make it easier to purge voters from the rolls.

• NATIONAL: The noncitizen voter mystery: New Trump numbers raise more questions than answers (VoteBeat).

• NEW JERSEY: Judge dismisses Trump lawsuit seeking NJ voter data (New Jersey Monitor).

• TEXAS: Texas confirms some flagged as potential noncitizens on voter rolls had provided DPS proof of citizenship (VoteBeat).

• CALIFORNIA: ‘Serious doubts about the reliability of your data’: California bluntly challenges DHS over sweeping noncitizen voter claims (Democracy Docket).

• PENNSYLVANIA: Pennsylvania asks Trump admin how it identified potential noncitizens registered to vote (VoteBeat).

• ALASKA, ARKANSAS, MISSOURI, NEBRASKA, NEW HAMPSHIRE, NEW JERSEY, OHIO, OREGON, NEW MEXICO, SOUTH DAKOTA, WEST VIRGINIA, and PENNSYLVANIA: Flap over noncitizens on state voter rolls seen as unlikely to boost SAVE America Act (States Newsroom).

• NEW JERSEY: NJ culls some improper voter registrations, sends others to counties for review (New Jersey Monitor).

• NEW MEXICO: New Mexico Secretary of State agrees to turn over voter death error records following lawsuit (Source New Mexico).

• NORTH CAROLINA: NC voting rights groups say they’ll increase efforts to help voters overcome obstacles (North Carolina Newsline).

• NORTH CAROLINA: NC Senate approves controversial elections bill along party lines (North Carolina Newsline).

Ballot Reform & Direct Democracy Under Pressure

Reformers spent the week playing defense in a few different places. The Democratic National Committee is weighing a rule that could bar Maine, and eventually other states, from using ranked-choice voting in the 2028 presidential primary, even where voters approved it directly. Alaskans will decide the fate of their own ranked-choice system at the ballot box this cycle, and a federal appeals court appeared open to Maine’s limits on super PAC contributions.

• NATIONAL: DNC Could Ban Ranked Choice Voting in 2028 — Even Where Voters Made It Law (Independent Voter News).

• ALASKA: Alaskans to vote on ballot measure that would overhaul state election system (Alaska Beacon).

• ALASKA: Ballot Measure 1, on the Aug. 18 statewide primary ballot, would reimpose limits on financial donations to state candidates(Alaska Beacon).

• MAINE: Appeals Court judges seem open to Maine limits on super PAC contributions (CommonWealth Beacon).

• ARKANSAS: Petitions for Arkansas direct democracy proposal fall short, secretary of state says (Arkansas Advocate).

• ARKANSAS: Judge hears testimony in case over Arkansas’ initiative process restrictions (Arkansas Advocate).

ICE Widens Its Reach in the States

Immigration enforcement kept generating friction between state and local officials and the federal government. Pennsylvania’s governor is facing new pressure to close a youth detention center and end the state’s collaboration with ICE, a federal court struck down part of Trump’s mass detention policy, and Colorado’s Aurora City Council pressed a private contractor over a tuberculosis outbreak at one of its facilities.

• PENNSYLVANIA: Gov. Shapiro faces calls to close youth detention center, end state collaboration with ICE (Pennsylvania Capital Star).

• MASSACHUSETTS: Immigrant protection accord includes state, local enforcement rules (CommonWealth Beacon).

• CALIFORNIA: Why federal court struck down Trump’s mass detention policy (CalMatters).

• COLORADO: Aurora council insists on cooperation from GEO Group over tuberculosis investigation at ICE facility (Colorado Newsline).

• TENNESSEE: Agency providing legal help to immigrant kids forced to shut doors amid Trump administration cuts (Tennessee Lookout).

• ARIZONA: Gallego donates Palantir cash to immigrant relief fund, cuts ties with ICE’s ‘tech backbone’ (Arizona Mirror).

Midterm Primaries Take Shape

With primary day approaching in several states, election administration was the story this week. Arizona’s new ballot drop-off option is proving popular, Wisconsin voters are contending with USPS mail delays severe enough to draw a lawsuit, and special and primary elections in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina are reshaping several fields.

• ARIZONA: New ballot drop-off option proves popular in primary, potentially leading to faster election results (Arizona Mirror).

• WISCONSIN: Everything you need to know about how to vote in the Wisconsin primary (VoteBeat).

• WISCONSIN: Amid USPS delays, Wisconsin officials tell voters to mail their ballots ASAP and voters sue for more options (VoteBeat).

• WISCONSIN: Judge rejects Democrats’ request to allow primary re-votes (Wisconsin Examiner).

• MISSOURI: Campaign spending accelerates as Missouri primary election draws near (Missouri Independent).

• SOUTH CAROLINA: SC GOP bars 3 candidates from primary ballot, leaving 9 to compete for US Senate (South Carolina Daily Gazette).

• GEORGIA: Special election to fill late Georgia congressman’s seat advances to an August runoff (Georgia Recorder).

• RHODE ISLAND: Dems ramp up TV ad spending in primary race for AG (Rhode Island Current).

In case you missed it…

• Democracy Renovators Are All on the Same Side, by Danielle Allen, July 30, 2026

• July 27 Tech and Democracy Roundup: The Battle to Regulate Prediction Markets, by Zachey Kliger, July 27, 2026

• Justice in Motion, by Daniel Miller and Steve Silverman, July 25, 2026

• DOJ Hunts for Voter Rolls, Arizona’s Secretary of State Race, and Redistricting Continues, by Beth Fukumoto, July 24, 2026

• Rebuilding the machinery of government can’t be a partisan project, by Jennifer Pahlka, July 24, 2026

Join Us for the Next Renovator Assembly

Join us for the next Renovator Assembly, a conversation for paid subscribers on Thursday, August 6, at 7 p.m. ET, with Lisa Rice. After being told she could no longer receive a ballot in Washington, D.C.’s only consequential elections, Lisa founded Make All Votes Count DC and led the campaign that passed semi-open primaries and ranked-choice voting with nearly 73 percent of the vote in November 2024. Then she kept going — building Grow Democracy DC to fight the litigation and the recalcitrant City Council through implementation, winning the Council’s reversal on semi-open primaries just last month. She’ll talk with us about how her organization pulled off major change against entrenched opposition, where she found the resilience to sustain it, and what comes next.

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Paid subscribers can find the Zoom registration link below.

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I have a stake in both sides of that rivalry, if that’s what it is. I chair the board of FairVote, the nation’s largest ranked choice voting advocacy organization, and I am the convening chair of the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, the ballot initiative campaign seeking to bring all-party primaries to Massachusetts. If these two reforms were truly at odds, I would be at war with myself.

They are not at odds. They are compatible reforms with distinct and complementary benefits. All-party primaries shift the decisive election in state and federal races to November, when most people vote and the electorate is more diverse. Ranked choice voting (RCV) changes how voters express their preferences in any election and frees them to support the candidates they actually prefer without fear of spoilers. Both systems reward candidates who reach beyond a narrow base. The reforms can also be combined, and they work well where they have been. Alaska pairs an all-party primary (top four) with a ranked choice general election. Seattle has adopted ranked choice voting within its all-party primary and will use that combination for the first time in 2027. The advocates pursuing a top-four system for the city of Boston are following Alaska’s path.

My second wish would be for reformers to pay closer attention to state law. The particulars of each state’s legal system shape the order in which reforms can be pursued. Sometimes that context affects where things move in parallel and where they cascade through sequential steps.

The all-party primaries ballot initiative now before Massachusetts voters applies to state elections only. This initiative changes nothing about how cities and towns run their elections. Every home-rule petition, every local RCV campaign, every study committee proceeds exactly as before. VoterChoiceMA continues its terrific work advancing municipal ranked choice voting across the state, including the push for a top-four system in Boston. The two efforts solve different problems: Municipal RCV reformers are improving nonpartisan local elections, while all-party primaries ensure that the broader, more diverse general election electorate makes the decisive choice in state and federal elections.

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Massachusetts law is a case in point. In 2023, a combined petition — a top-five all-party primary plus a ranked choice voting general election — was submitted to the state attorney general for approval. The attorney general’s office declined to certify it under Article 48 of the Massachusetts Constitution, which requires that a ballot initiative contain only “related or mutually dependent” subjects. The attorney general ruled that the two reforms could not be tied together in a single ballot question — even though Alaska, applying its own single-subject rule, let voters adopt both in one 2020 measure. That they cannot be done at the same time, though, does not make the two reforms incompatible. For those of us who like the Alaska system, it makes them a question of sequence.

The Massachusetts initiative does not foreclose a ranked choice future for the Bay State. It opens the door to the Alaska model. The Coalition for Healthy Democracy designed the all-party primary initiative with exactly that possibility in mind. With all-party primaries in place, it would become legally feasible for the first time to run and win a top-four ranked choice ballot measure. That choice remains, as it should, with the voters; the coalition takes no position on it, but our ranks include many RCV supporters.

The status quo does not need coordination to defend itself. But a renovation movement that treats every reform as a competitor to every other will lose to the status quo every time. In contrast, reforms undertaken both in parallel and in sequence can compound. Each victory makes the next more achievable. Supporting all-party primaries is not choosing between reforms. It is putting one piece in a complex puzzle into place.

Join us for the next Renovator Assembly, a conversation for paid subscribers on Thursday, August 6, at 7 p.m. ET, with Lisa Rice. After being told she could no longer receive a ballot in Washington, D.C.’s only consequential elections, Lisa founded Make All Votes Count DC and led the campaign that passed semi-open primaries and ranked-choice voting with nearly 73 percent of the vote in November 2024. Then she kept going — building Grow Democracy DC to fight the litigation and the recalcitrant City Council through implementation, winning the Council’s reversal on semi-open primaries just last month. She’ll talk with us about how her organization pulled off major change against entrenched opposition, where she found the resilience to sustain it, and what comes next.

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Paid subscribers can find the Zoom registration link below.

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So much for July being a slow news month. The Trump administration launched an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse to rapidly respond to vulnerabilities in critical government infrastructure. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced a comprehensive artificial intelligence package that includes mandatory government testing of advanced AI models. And New York became the first state to enact a statewide data-center moratorium.

There’s much more to cover, and we have the latest headlines below. But let’s begin with the story of Gabriel Perez, who until last week had served as President Donald Trump’s teleprompter guy since 2016. (This has to make Mr. Perez one of Trump’s longest serving staffers, right?) The allegations are spicy: Perez won over $100,000 on the prediction market Kalshi by wagering on specific words and phrases he was in a position to know the president would use during major addresses, including the State of the Union. He’s been placed on unpaid leave.

I didn’t make much of the story at first. Someone in Trump’s orbit potentially profiting off proximity to power is hardly news at this point. And it’s an open secret that prediction markets – online platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket that allow anyone to trade on the outcome of future events – are prone to insider trading.

But the pattern of profiteering by public officials on these markets is becoming harder to ignore. Just in the past 120 days: a U.S. soldier was arrested for betting on Polymarket ahead of the Venezuela raid (he won all 13 of his wagers, cashing out $400k); three congressional candidates and dozens of campaign staffers were caught trading on their own races; and the White House warned staff against using nonpublic information to place these bets – months before Perez’s own bets surfaced.

“It’s possible these trades are faster and easier than a stock trade,” Alexandra Thornton, senior director of Financial Regulation at Center for American Progress, told The Renovator. “But the real advantages are that it can be done anonymously using crypto, and that there are infinitely more ways insider information could be used.”

Thornton co-authored a CAP report this month arguing that prediction markets have become “an emerging venue for corruption that both threatens national security and undermines the American public’s trust in their government.”

Others argue the risks are overstated. Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist who developed modern prediction market theory, points out that these platforms are actually more resistant to manipulation than institutions we already tolerate. “Compare these markets to other information institutions we have – gossip, journalism, academia,” he told The Renovator. “Political insiders can also leak information to journalists – that’s happened plenty in the past. Does that worry you just as much, or is this somehow extra problematic because it’s financialized, because it’s money, because it’s less prestigious people involved?”

Hanson added that many of the things people don’t like about prediction markets are actually just things they don’t like about ordinary financial markets: “Don’t just dump on the new guy for the same problems that happen with the old guy.”

But prediction markets don’t face the same federal guardrails as financial markets. Members of Congress have been required to disclose stock trades since 2012, and a House measure passed last week would ban members from trading stocks outright. No comparable legal framework covers prediction markets.

The Senate did pass a resolution in April banning its own members and staff from trading on prediction markets. Thornton calls that a good first step, but argues Congress should go further and bar all federal elected officials, political appointees, executive branch employees and congressional staff outright. “It’s very hard to draw lines around what constitutes legal use of inside information,” she said. “It’s much better to simply say a federal employee is banned from using prediction markets, full stop.”

States aren’t waiting on Congress. Seven governors have banned state employees from using insider information on prediction markets. Fifteen states have introduced their own prediction markets legislation this year – some (Minnesota) pursue outright bans; others (Pennsylvania, Illinois) build licensing and taxation regimes; and others (Ohio) focus specifically on barring public officials from trading. And at least a dozen states have active lawsuits against Kalshi and Polymarket, with most arguing the platforms are unlicensed sportsbooks operating outside state gambling law. In several cases, including Illinois and Minnesota, Kalshi and Polymarket have filed their own suits, arguing their platforms are federally regulated financial products, not gambling operations subject to state oversight.

On Friday, the National Conference of State Legislatures urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — the federal agency that oversees financial trading markets — to protect state authority over these markets. But the CFTC shows no sign of budging. The agency has sued at least nine states to defend what it calls its exclusive authority over these trades.

As the legal battles play out, Thornton expects more incidents of insider trading, pointing to the strong incentive government employees have to act inappropriately. She also doesn’t rule out subtler effects on democracy and civic life.

“I think it’s critically important that people think about the impact of being able to bet on literally anything – financializing every kind of event, down to ridiculous things – and whether that diverts our focus away from the things that actually matter.”

Now, onto the other big headlines.

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What Else Happened

White House

• The Trump administration committed $5B to a new Energy Department AI research initiative, part of a broader push to steer federal science funding from universities to individual researchers.

• 23 governors, 187 companies joined Trump’s voluntary “ratepayer protection pledge,” promising to shield consumers from AI data center costs.

Congress

• An OpenAI model escaped a test sandbox and hacked Hugging Face this month. Citing the incident, Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Tex.) introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, which would give DHS the authority to shut down AI models deemed too dangerous.

• Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.), Tom Barrett (R-Mich.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) introduced a bipartisan bill requiring human oversight of AI-enabled weapons.

• Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) reintroduced their federal AI oversight bill, narrowing the previous version’s state preemption language to allow states to regulate child safety issues related to AI.

States

• Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R) signed a “Clean Slate” law, making Missouri the 14^th state to automatically seal old criminal records.

• Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) signed an executive order ending state tax incentives for data centers.

• The Los Angeles Police Department suspended its license-plate surveillance program amid concerns that the data is supporting Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Influence

• Over 200 startups launched a new D.C. trade group to counter Big Tech’s political influence.

• Obama-Biden alumni launched a new group to shape a Democratic AI policy platform ahead of 2028.

Research

• New study from Meta’s Oversight Board found leading AI chatbots - including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT - refuse to criticize authoritarian regimes more than twice as often as they refuse to criticize democracies.

• New study from a European civil liberties group found AI chatbots gave inaccurate and unreliable voting advice in Hungary’s election.

Finally … Join us for the next Renovator Assembly on Thursday, August 6, at 7 p.m. ET, with Lisa Rice. After being told she could no longer receive a ballot in the D.C. Democratic primary -- the city’s only truly consequential election -- Rice founded Make All Votes Count DC and led the campaign that passed semi-open primaries and ranked-choice voting with nearly 73 percent of the vote in November 2024. Then she kept going — building Grow Democracy DC to fight the litigation and the recalcitrant city council through implementation, winning the council’s reversal on semi-open primaries just last month. She’ll talk with us about how her organization pulled off major change against entrenched opposition, where she found the resilience to sustain it, and what comes next. Paid subscribers can find the Zoom registration link below.

Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/w5WwnGDWSveqsFm_jT5Lsg ]

Just after July 4th, a bus rolled through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan carrying an unusual array of passengers: sitting and retired judges on their way to talk with ordinary Americans about the Constitution.

The tour, called Justice in Motion, is easy to describe and a little surreal to picture. Over four days, judges and civic leaders held press conferences, community panels, and meet-and-greets in small towns and big cities. There was a “March of the Robes” from the federal courthouse in Columbus to the Ohio Supreme Court that emulated the iconic March of a Thousand Robes in Warsaw in 2020. There was a fireside conversation with the Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court at the Grosse Pointe Public Library. There was a BBQ lunch at Cleveland’s ThirdSpace Action Lab where community members ate chicken from Pearl’s Kitchen and talked with jurists about why courts matter. In Cleveland, retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly told a crowd gathered outside the Carl B. Stokes U.S. Courthouse — law students, Girl Scouts, Stokes Scholars, and students from the Law and Leadership Institute — that every generation inherits the same question about the Constitution: will they leave it stronger than they found it, or weaker?

Justice in Motion — the first tour of its kind in the United States, with more planned to follow — was organized by our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, and our partner Keep Our Republic.

The idea didn’t start with a bus, though. Last October, The Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program brought a delegation of U.S. lawyers and civic leaders to Warsaw for a study tour, to sit down directly with the Polish judges and lawyers who had spent years defending their courts. They were joined by democracy leaders from Georgia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, as well as from the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. Steve was part of that trip. It’s where we first heard, in detail, how they’d done it. As we launched Democracy Rising Collaborative last November, the idea of a bus trip as a kind of listening tour began to take hold. We drafted a concept paper and shared it with a few trusted colleagues in the pro-democracy space, including colleagues who had been on the Warsaw trip. The feedback was universally positive. Before long, we were talking with Keep Our Republic about actually doing a judges’ bus tour.

That sentence about what every generation owes the next — the one Justice Donnelly offered a crowd in Cleveland — is doing more work than it might seem. Judges don’t normally stand outside courthouses asking crowds to think about what they owe the next generation. They write opinions. They preside. They stay, by design and by professional norm, above the fray, deciding cases rather than making speeches about how they do their work and why deciding cases matters. Justice in Motion breaks with that. It puts judges in front of communities not to rule on anything, but to engage in face-face dialogue, answer questions, and explain, plainly and personally, what the rule of law and independent judiciary are for and why threats to judges, their families, and staff are never OK.

That’s a real departure, and it’s worth sitting with why it’s happening now.

The short-term case is obvious. American courts have been under sustained attack for years — not the ordinary friction of appeals and dissents, but a campaign to delegitimize judges themselves: to paint rulings political actors dislike as illegitimate by definition, to threaten and intimidate jurists, to treat “independent judiciary” as a euphemism for “obstacle.”

And that is just the rhetoric. Physical threats, doxxing, and other forms of intimidation have only become increasingly prevalent. On July 14th, Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan testified before Congress about threats to the safety of members of the Court. Barrett said that the threat level is “really high.” Kagan attested that the Supreme Court Police anticipated a “very substantial” 38% annual increase in threats. No matter how you feel about the Court’s decisions, threats of violence against public servants or their families are never compatible with democracy or justice.

Judges have rarely responded to this kind of pressure and these threats, on the theory that silence protects impartiality and that others will respond on their behalf.

But silence has a cost too. If the only voices explaining what courts do are the ones trying to discredit them, the public absorbs a distorted picture by default. A tour like this is, in part, triage: judges showing up in person, in communities that rarely see them outside a courthouse, to say plainly that the rule of law and an independent judiciary are not partisan weapons; they’re the things that let a democracy settle its disputes without violence. It is one of the concepts that make the United States what it is.

What the rule of law and an independent judiciary actually mean

None of this was abstract in Columbus, Grosse Pointe, or Cleveland — it’s what the judges on that bus were trying to explain, town by town: not a legal abstraction, but something people experience in their everyday lives.

The rule of law is a simple idea, even if the phrase sounds abstract: the same rules apply to everyone, including the people in charge, and everyone can count on that in advance. It’s why, when you deposit money in the bank, you don’t have to wonder whether it’ll still be there tomorrow. It’s why, when a police officer pulls you over, there are actual limits on what happens next — you have rights in that encounter, and both of you are subject to the same rulebook. It’s why a small business owner can sign a contract with a much bigger company and trust that if the bigger company breaks it, a court will enforce the deal anyway, size and power aside. It’s why a family can buy a house and know the deed means what it says, ten or twenty years later, no matter who’s in office. These are the same ideas that many of the judges on our tour spent days talking about with their fellow citizens.

None of that happens automatically. It happens because courts exist that will enforce those rules on your behalf, even against someone powerful — and that only works if judges are actually free to rule that way without getting threatened, fired, demoted, or squeezed for it. That’s what judicial independence is: judges who are free to decide a case on the law and the facts, rather than on a shifting political climate, because they can’t be removed or punished for a ruling those in power dislike; and courts whose decisions can’t simply be ignored once made.

If the courts are delegitimized, the rule of law stops being real, even if the words stay on the books. The bank account is only as safe as whoever has the power to seize it. The traffic stop only goes well if you’re the right person, or you know the right person. The contract only holds if the other side doesn’t have more leverage than you. Laws still exist, but they’ve stopped being a shield — they’re a tool, available to whoever’s currently in charge, aimed at whoever they want it aimed at.

An independent judiciary does more than referee everyday disputes fairly, though. It’s also the place a person can go to argue that a law itself is unconstitutional — even a popular law, passed by a large majority, that no legislature has any incentive to revisit. Take away that neutral forum, and there’s nothing left to stop the majority’s preference from simply becoming the rule for everyone it leaves out.

It’s also why the judiciary exists as its own separate branch, rather than an arm of whichever branch currently holds the most seats or the loudest microphone. Congress writes the laws, the executive enforces them, and courts decide what the laws mean and whether they were followed — three different jobs, held by different people, precisely so that no single branch can do all three at once. An independent judiciary is what keeps that arrangement from collapsing into one: without it, whichever branch is willing to lean on the courts hardest ends up holding all the power, not just its own share of it. Our Founders designed our Constitution to avoid any one branch becoming too powerful.

That’s the actual stake in impeachment threats over a controversial ruling, or a refusal to comply with a court order: not a procedural skirmish, but whether disputes in this country get settled by law, or by whoever has the power to disregard a result they don’t like. Even when we disagree with a decision, it’s in our interest to uphold the independence of the judiciary that made it, because the alternative weakens the rule of law in general.

Justice in Motion drew packed rooms and extensive local and national press in three states over four days — evidence of an appetite for more tours like it elsewhere. That appetite is the useful signal here. The tour worked as a bold response to a moment of extraordinary pressure on the judiciary. It could also work as the seed of something sustained and durable: a standing corps of jurists treating public explanation of judicial independence as part of the job description rather than an occasional exercise.

Defending judicial independence right now is necessary, but it’s not sufficient — the underlying vulnerability isn’t this attack or that one; it’s that most Americans never learned, in any durable way, what the judiciary is or why it’s built to be independent. You can’t defend an institution you were never taught to understand. And civic education in this country has been in slow collapse for decades, squeezed out by testing regimes, budget cuts, and the assumption that democratic literacy would just happen by osmosis.

Long-term, what we’re proposing is something closer to infrastructure — one more piece of the civic architecture a democracy needs so that the next attack on the rule of law meets a public that already understands what’s actually at risk. Authoritarian drift doesn’t get stopped in a single news cycle. It gets stopped, over time, by citizens who understand what they’re at risk of losing. That’s a slower fight than a bus tour, but the bus tour is a good place to shine a light on this foundational institution of our Republic.

Danny Miller and Steve Silverman are attorneys and the co-founders and co-directors of Democracy Rising Collaborative, an organization that mobilizes lawyers, retired judges, and civic leaders across the country to stand up for the rule of law.

Join Us for the Next Renovator Assembly

Join us for the next Renovator Assembly, a conversation for paid subscribers on Thursday, August 6, at 7 p.m. ET, with Lisa Rice. After being told she could no longer receive a ballot in Washington, D.C.’s only consequential elections, Lisa founded Make All Votes Count DC and led the campaign that passed semi-open primaries and ranked-choice voting with nearly 73 percent of the vote in November 2024. Then she kept going — building Grow Democracy DC to fight the litigation and the recalcitrant City Council through implementation, winning the Council’s reversal on semi-open primaries just last month. She’ll talk with us about how her organization pulled off major change against entrenched opposition, where she found the resilience to sustain it, and what comes next.

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It’s Friday, July 24, 2026, and time for your Democracy in the States’ Weekly Roundup.

This week, the fight over who runs elections escalated on multiple fronts: the House passed the SAVE America Act’s anti-voting measures in a reconciliation package, and Trump urged the Senate to follow suit during a rally in Georgia while the Justice Department kept pressing state officials for voter roll data. Maryland, meanwhile, moved toward its own special session on mid-cycle redistricting.

We’re covering these developments and more state-level changes to election administration, redistricting, judicial independence, and election reform below.

Voting Restrictions & Data Access

Congress and the administration moved in parallel this week to influence how states run elections: the House folded new voting restrictions into a must-pass reconciliation bill, and the Justice Department kept pressing states for voter roll data. Still, early voting turnout is running high in two states, and Congress got a renewed push to expand ballot access nationally.

• NATIONAL: House passes SAVE America Act anti-voting measures in budget reconciliation, stock trading bills (Democracy Docket).

• NATIONAL: Georgia Secretary of State’s office responds to Trump DOJ threats, defends voting policies (Democracy Docket).

• IOWA: Ryan Peterman seeks secretary of state records on voter data shared with DOJ (Iowa Capital Dispatch).

• OREGON: ‘Not about improving elections’: Oregon secretary of state slams new Trump election threats (Oregon Capital Chronicle).

• NEW JERSEY: NJ Republicans target two laws as they seek probe into non-citizen voting reveal (New Jersey Monitor).

• NORTH CAROLINA: NC elections board vote makes it easier to throw out mail-in ballots (North Carolina Newsline).

• KANSAS: Kansas elections chief launches legal full-court press against mail ballot grace periods (Democracy Docket).

• MISSOURI: Missouri early voting period opens with a rush that points to high primary turnout (Missouri Independent).

• TENNESSEE: 75K voters cast ballots in strong start for Tennessee early voting (Tennessee Lookout).

• NATIONAL: With Voting Rights Under Attack by Trump, Pressley, Welch Reintroduce Bill to Expand Right to Vote and End Felony Disenfranchisement (Campaign Legal Center).

• ARIZONA: GOP picks election denier Alexander Kolodin to challenge Adrian Fontes for secretary of state (Arizona Mirror).

• ARIZONA: Neil DeSanti, GOP candidate who pushed election fraud claims, indicted for voting illegally (Arizona Mirror).

Redistricting Continues

Mid-cycle redistricting is back, with Maryland’s governor formally calling a special session to amend the state constitution’s map-drawing rules.

• MARYLAND: Moore issues executive order officially calling special session (Maryland Matters).

• MISSOURI: Uncertain congressional map hangs over Missouri’s crowded 5th District GOP primary (Missouri Independent).

• INDIANA: Braun grew reelection cash while joining others in bankrolling redistricting revenge (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

Ranked-Choice Voting Wave Keeps Building

Two more cities are putting ranked-choice voting on the ballot this November and a fresh look at how DC’s primary played out under RCV shows what’s at stake.

• NATIONAL: Honolulu will vote on ranked choice voting in November (FairVote).

• NATIONAL: Longmont, CO set to vote on ranked choice voting in November (FairVote).

• NATIONAL: Analyzing Washington, DC’s primary results: most voters ranked 2+ candidates, and what RCV tells us about the electorate (FairVote).

In case you missed it…

• Lisa Rice: Washington D.C.’s Democracy Renovation Hero, by Danielle Allen, July 23, 2026

• Civic Education News Roundup: Student Voting and the State of the Field of Civic Thought., by Joanna Kenty, July 20, 2026

• 250 Years In: The Civic Education Story America Needs to Remember, by Michael Blauw, July 18, 2026