Without the protections of the Voting Rights Act, many look to state solutions

Almost half of U.S. states guarantee citizens’ rights to petition for ballot measures, but the coronavirus made gathering signatures in person infeasible. Massachusetts courts allowed electronic signatures, but other states have not approved virtual citizen initiative campaigns. Ballot initiatives allow citizens to advance solutions and enact structural changes without relying on support from elected officials. MA groups used DocuSign to gather 30,000 signatures to get a proposal for ranked choice voting on the ballot. Not all MA groups were able to quickly or successfully pivot to the e-signature process.

California residents passed Proposition 11, a redistricting reform ballot initiative, in 2008 and in 2010, voters strengthened that reform by passing a bill to allow an independent commission to redraw state and congressional lines. Fourteen people, who were selected from 30,000 applicants, spent a year holding public hearings across the state to make informed decisions on how to fairly redraw district maps. As a result, more than a dozen Congressional incumbents lost their seats, which was not an intentional outcome but rather what resulted from decisions made based on the public testimony they heard.

To end prison gerrymandering, the city council in Wilmington, Delaware, counted people who are incarcerated in the local prison at their last address in the city for the 2020 Census. People who are incarcerated there but did not live in Wilmington were not counted.

A grassroots campaign ended gerrymandering in Michigan by passing an initiative requiring districts be drawn by citizen-commissions rather than politicians. The all-volunteer campaign went door-to-door collecting enough signatures to get the initiative on the ballot and used creative voter-engagement techniques to sustain the support. Once the ballot initiative passed, 9,300 people applied for the first commission. A third-party firm ultimately selected four Democrats, four Republicans, and five non-partisan people as commissioners, who worked together very well to redraw districts.

In California, two laws have helped to open opportunities for less experienced candidates to win state and local offices, which has increased representation among people of color. A 1990 law set term limits for the state legislature, which forces turnover, and the California Voting Rights Act allowed communities of color to demand electoral changes, including by-district elections that have increased Latinx and Black representatives at the local level. These laws have helped to level the playing field but the benefits have not occurred across all districts, instead they tend to be driven by a few cities.

Low voter turnouts, populists offering half-truths, corporate interests, and the blurring of facts in the media are signs that democracy around the world is in turmoil. Internationally, citizens have assembled different programs and initiatives that arm ordinary people with information about policy and their elected officials, as well as distinctive ways to reform the electoral system.

After Michigan updated laws surrounding the processing of absentee ballots, local clerks were able to begin opening, verifying, and scanning absentee ballots up to eight days before the state’s August primary, depending on the size of the city or town. In Detroit, election staff were able to report 80% of the absentee ballot results by 10:30 p.m. on election day, as opposed to the next morning, which clerks say helps avoid public concerns about election security.

Voters Not Politicians is a grassroots initiative that, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, ran a successful campaign to defeat gerrymandering in Michigan. The state has a citizen-led ballot initiative option, so the group held townhall meetings and gathered over 410,000 voter signatures to get the initiative on the statewide ballot. The measure was challenged in courts, but the group raised funds for legal help and the initiative passed by a margin of 61-39 percent. The new law requires that an independent group of average citizens will decide district boundaries with full transparency.

Voter turnout is higher where voting is made easy. Consider one innovation: vote-by mail. States that allowed mail-in ballots had an average of 10 percent more voting in the 2016 election than other states. More innovations include pre-registering young voters, automatically updating a voter’s address when they move, automatically registering citizens unless they opt out, and same-day voter registration.

Corruption in Mexico is ingrained in all systems and interactions. President Vicente Fox and his administration are trying to change this. Their mentality is that for corruption to truly be fought the government needs to actively make change and implement rules to counteract it, and some of Fox's changes are now beginning to see improvements.