Public Wise Democracy Policies

Through our research, organizing, lobbying and partnerships, we have come to believe in the necessity of a core set of democracy policies. These policies reflect the need for a fundamental fairness and transparency in the basics of how our government ought to engage with its citizens. While these policies specifically do not privilege any group or constituency, they would, if enacted, tip the scales back into fairness with respect to constituencies who have borne, and continue to bear, the brunt of anti-democratic movements across the United States.

Every citizen should be automatically registered to vote upon turning 18 or upon becoming a citizen through naturalization. This gets at the heart of what it means to be a citizen of a democracy – that one’s inherent rights include the right to participate in choosing our leaders. While the principle is enough, our research into both American and international elections also shows it is far and away the most impactful policy a nation can adopt to increase participation in elections.

Political parties in time-bound control of state legislatures should not be empowered to rig the game to prevent their own loss of power in free and fair elections. The construction of legislative districts that bear no resemblance to real contiguous communities, designed only to prevent majorities living in those real communities from expressing themselves politically, runs counter to the most basic concepts of a representative democracy. In state after state – Wisconsin, North Carolina, etc – state and congressional legislative districts are so expressly designed to favor one political party that the differences between statewide election results and control of legislative chambers can be as far as 10 or more points apart. This is legalized cheating on behalf of the already powerful, and it is antithetical to what the United States stands for.

The filibuster empowers the representatives of a tiny minority of Americans to prevent the passage of legislation supported by the vast majority of Americans. Its history is nakedly racist and steeped in defense of segregation and opposition of the progress of racial justice; moreover, over time its use as an open weapon of partisan warfare has become so standard as to be taken for granted, with fully half of all filibusters in American history taking place since 2012.

We believe that no one should lose their right to vote due to a felony conviction. The history of felon disenfranchisement in the United States is highly racialized, with a surge in such laws immediately following the Civil War and adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. As voting rights were being extended to African Americans, many states implemented Black Codes that specifically targeted Black people and made a wide variety of crimes punishable by disenfranchisement. In some former Confederate states, wide swaths of Black citizens are disenfranchised through such laws; in Tennessee, for example, a stunning 21% of Black people otherwise eligible to vote are disenfranchised due to felony convictions. During the 2020 elections, 1 out of every 44 Americans was unable to vote due to a felony conviction. This enormous loss of civic participation is unacceptable and immoral, and should end.

In many states and localities, officials remove eligible voters from registration simply because they have not voted for some period of time or because there is a potential discrepancy in addresses (many of which prove to be clerical errors or mistaken identity). Such voter roll purges almost always target communities that are already historically disenfranchised and where civic participation is low, compounding problems of lack of participation and resulting lack of representation. Such purges are abhorrent and nonsensical: if we want people to vote, we do not make it harder to do so simply because they have not recently. These nakedly suppressive and politically motivated purges should be illegal everywhere.

The Supreme Court of the United States should adopt a binding code of judicial ethics with clearly delineated penalties for violation. This binding code of ethics should include mandatory disclosure of outside income including valuable gifts, stronger recusal rules, increased transparency of Justices’ financial holdings and an external body with the mandate to investigate and sanction violations.

Supreme Court justices should not serve active lifetime appointments, but rather 18 year terms as active justices after which they assume a role as senior justices, available to hear cases in instances of recusal or other empty seats on the bench. This would allow every president the chance to add two justices to the court, reducing the extreme partisan influence on nominations and confirmations.

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