And shift reform focus from defense to innovation.

Lawless, mafioso-like attacks on U.S. elections have dominated our minds, our media, and our reform efforts since 2020. From President Trump’s demand that Secretary of State Raffensperger “find” him 11,000 votes, to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, to local agitators resistant to evidence, American elections have suffered years of harassment and attempted sabotage. 

Fighting back has worked. America’s pro-democracy organizations have mobilized lawyers to win court battles and communications specialists to counter allegations and rebuild trust. Those efforts have yielded major successes, including stopping the President’s unconstitutional assertions of power over elections and preparing vigorous responses to a wide range of potential threats.

As a result, our elections are much better protected than most people think. Democracy Project essays by Bob Bauer and by Stephen Richer and Gina Goldenberg help illustrate why that’s so.

Defensive vigilance will still be needed through this election and the next, but we are now in a position to start confronting a different threat, not powerful individuals attacking elections from without, but partisan abuse within our election institutions themselves.

America gives parties and partisans extraordinary power over the governance of elections in which they compete.  That structural problem runs through our system—from legislators drawing their own districts, to partisan secretaries of state overseeing elections and ballot measures, to party-controlled election boards and certification of results. The next phase of reform needs to reduce the risk of insider threats from those structures.

The gerrymandering crisis shows why this task is urgent. Mid-decade redistricting, largely unknown since the nineteenth century, has dramatically intensified the political arms race. In little more than a year, nearly 40% of all Congressional districts have been redrawn, moving one out of every seven voters into new districts.

This win-at-all-costs politics is spilling over into parts of our system that depend on restraint by partisan election officials.  Exhibit A is Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who tried to shoehorn a new gerrymandered Congressional map into use despite a citizen veto effort putting the map on hold. He also tried to sideline a key ballot measure strengthening citizen initiatives against partisan abuse. The state Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him on both issues and found him in contempt of court.

Secretary Hoskins reflects what happens when neither party is “capable of restraint,” and when “the informal check bipartisan administration relies on simply stops functioning,” writes Samuel Issacharoff. When winning becomes existential, the constraints stopping partisan officials from exploiting their power slip away.

A similar breakdown happened in Ohio two years earlier. Secretary of State Frank LaRose fought to protect his party and its gerrymandering power against a citizen initiative to establish independent redistricting. LaRose wrote ludicrously deceptive language on the ballot summary, and the Ohio Supreme Court allowed that manipulation, likely causing the initiative’s narrow loss.

The U.S. is the only major democratic country in the world to rely on partisan-elected Secretaries of State like Hoskins and LaRose to run elections. Partisans also dominate redistricting, election boards, certification of results, and management of ballot measures. In recent years, each of those functions has been convulsed by the problem Issacharoff identifies: partisan election officials in win-at-all-cost mode trying to help their side win.

The point is not to condemn political parties. Parties are essential in democracy, but democracy needs parties to stay in their lane, deriving power from competitive elections, not from controlling the game. The more the fight between the parties intensifies, the farther we drift from that principle.

Courts can often stop abuses by partisan officials, but they are more effective in some areas, like refusals to certify results, than in others, like partisan gerrymandering. More generally, it’s neither healthy nor sustainable for the judiciary to repeatedly counter flawed administrative structures, particularly when the courts, too, face partisan pressures.

Manipulation efforts that succeed have very negative consequences for voters and our democracy. Ballot measure manipulation has helped lock in single-party rule. Partisan gerrymanders mean fewer problem-solvers in Congress, more safe districts where fear of primary challengers is the dominant motivator, and the hollowing out of competition and accountability that make voting worth the effort. 

Addressing these deep-seated problems seems daunting. Calls for nonpartisan election governance often meet with the response that “everyone is partisan.” But impartial institutions do not require people without political views; they require structures that separate those views from official responsibilities. Our peer democratic countries have managed this task, building institutions that keep parties at arm’s length and that citizens mostly trust to function neutrally.

An American approach can build on existing models like judicial nominating commissions. Institutional designers can leverage growing research, including the important finding that appointed election officials outperform their elected counterparts.

What would an agenda for reducing partisan control of elections look like? Four areas stand out, sharing one objective: greater distance between political parties and the governance of electoral competition. Recent progress in these areas is summarized below.

1. Reform the partisan-elected secretary of state. A range of options exists to modify or replace the position, and a few former secretaries from both parties have urged state legislators to consider change.  Some states have seen progress in reducing conflicts of interest for this post. In Missouri, reformers are contemplating a broad-based impartial election commission to take over state election leadership.

2. Protect citizen ballot measures from partisan manipulation. Citizen groups are increasingly pursuing protections for the initiative process itself, including limits on legislative overrides. Missouri’s Amendment 6 (which Hoskins tried to block) is a key vote on that issue this November. Reforming secretary of state responsibilities can also help, given their role in the process in several states.

3. Reduce party control of local election administration. Research by my organization finds strong interest among local election officials in more separation from political parties, which are increasingly a source of pressure for them. That interest is translating into proposals to reform the partisan election of county clerks in Utah and other states and party control of county boards in Virginia.

4. End partisan control of redistricting. Gerrymandering is by far the hardest and most important challenge. A new initiative by the House Problem Solvers Caucus offers a step forward. Their framework recognizes that reform needs to be led by Congress, not the states, and needs to advance in a Noah’s Ark bipartisan fashion. The Caucus proposes to start with a ban on mid-decade redistricting that could provide a first win.

A shift toward this agenda offers much for the reform community and the foundations that support it. There are many opportunities across the states for near-term wins, and a range of polls shows strong bipartisan majority support.  Also, reforming election governance is a more clearly nonpartisan goal than defending elections sometimes has appeared to be.

This work will take a different kind of heroism than the standing up to bad actors that has characterized the democracy field for much of this decade. Instead, we will need innovative, collaborative institution building, and a willingness to step back from the defensive combat mode Trump has forced upon us. Making that shift—from defending institutions to improving their design—may be one of the democracy field’s hardest tasks. It will also enable critically important progress for the decade ahead.