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Certification of election results should be a fixed, non-discretionary duty, and control over who appoints election administrators shouldn't shift the moment a different party wins a different office.
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Jul 12, 2026
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Authority over who appoints, removes, or oversees state and local election administrators, and the standard for certifying an election's results, should not be structured or reassigned in ways timed to track which party currently holds a different office. Concretely: certification should be codified as a strictly ministerial duty everywhere, enforceable through an expedited mandamus process; any law reassigning appointment or removal authority over election administrators should take effect at the start of the next regular election cycle rather than immediately, unless enacted by a bipartisan supermajority; states should move toward fixed, party-balanced multi-member election oversight bodies rather than concentrating that authority in one partisan elected officer; election officials performing ministerial duties on schedule should have protection against retaliatory removal; and any new rule adding discretion to a certification process should undergo independent, published review before taking effect.
Whoever counts and certifies a vote should not be selected, or removable, by whichever party most recently won a different office: the narrow claim is about the neutrality of the counting and certifying mechanism specifically, not a broader claim that election administration must always be nonpartisan in every respect, or that appointed officials are inherently more trustworthy than elected ones. A state that elects its secretary of state directly and has never reassigned that authority on a partisan timer isn't in violation of this claim; North Carolina, which changed who appoints its election board in the same statute and timed to take effect within the same gubernatorial term as the transition, is the case this claim is built to name.
Primary — Privacy, Security, and Trust. This Core Value names "transparency and accountability in governance" and "trust in... services" directly. An election administration whose control flips to whichever party most recently won a different office cannot be trusted equally by the voters who lost that office's election, which is the exact trust this Core Value's mandate is written to protect, regardless of which party benefits from a given reassignment.
This issue is in tension with two legitimate interests it does not pretend away. First, direct accountability: a secretary of state elected by voters answers to them in a way an appointed multi-member board does not, and this issue's preference for balanced-board structures narrows that direct electoral link for any state that adopts it. Second, ordinary legislative authority: a newly elected government has a legitimate interest in reorganizing how it administers elections, and a prospective-effective-date requirement constrains the speed at which it can act on that mandate. The position resolves both tensions the same way: it regulates timing and structure, not outcomes. A state is free to keep an elected chief election official, and a legislature is free to reorganize election administration in its first year in office: the delayed-effective-date rule applies to any reassignment of appointment or removal authority, not only ones timed to a partisan transition, and only requires a bipartisan supermajority, not unanimity, to move faster than that, including for an ordinary, good-faith reorganization with no partisan timing behind it at all.
Collaboration here is institutional: election officials, parties, legislatures, courts, and voters must share a stable certification rule before they know which side will benefit. That prospective agreement gives political opponents a common process without asking them to share a political judgment.
The documented 2025-2026 record of successful or attempted reassignments of election administration authority runs almost entirely in one direction: North Carolina's transfer was enacted by a Republican legislative supermajority over a Democratic governor's veto, and Georgia's certification-discretion rule was adopted by a State Election Board with a Republican-appointed majority. It would be dishonest to manufacture a false balance where the current record doesn't show one. It would be equally dishonest to read that record as "Republicans are trying to steal elections." The same Georgia Supreme Court that struck down the certification rule had eight of its nine seats filled by Republican-governor appointees at the time, and it ruled against a Republican-majority board on statutory-authority grounds that named nothing about the rule's partisan origin. What the record shows is a specific, checkable pattern of maneuvers, not a partisan character trait: name the maneuver, not the party.
On the federal legislative side, the pattern reverses. The Freedom to Vote Act (S.1, 118th Congress, 2023), reintroduced by congressional Democrats with no identified Republican cosponsor and blocked by a Republican filibuster in its earlier forms, includes a provision limiting a statewide election official's ability to suspend or remove a local election administrator except for gross negligence, neglect of duty, or malfeasance: the same removal-for-cause standard this issue's fourth proposal applies more narrowly to retaliation specifically. This issue's position on certification-as-ministerial-duty and official protection sits closer to that bill's mechanism than to any current Republican proposal, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than obscuring it, the same discipline DEM-03 already applies to campaign finance. What neither party's current federal proposal includes is this issue's second and third mechanisms: a prospective-effective-date rule for appointment-authority transfers, and a preference for fixed party-balanced state election boards over single-officer control. Those are the Innovation Party's own synthesis, built from a structural gap in both parties' current legislative vehicles rather than a position either has already staked out.
The Texas Forward Party, the Forward Party's state affiliate, explicitly names "increased protection for election officials" alongside the reforms the national platform is better known for (nonpartisan primaries, independent redistricting, ranked-choice voting), making it the minor-party voice most directly aligned with this issue's fourth proposal specifically, though even that state platform doesn't specify a certification-discretion or appointment-timing mechanism of its own.
The strongest objection: a prospective-effective-date requirement for reassigning election-administration authority could just as easily block an urgent, good-faith reform as a partisan timing capture. A state that just uncovered documented corruption or incompetence in its election administration has a legitimate reason to act immediately, not after waiting out a full election cycle, and a critic could reasonably ask why this issue's mechanism can't tell the two cases apart.
It can, on the terms already built into the proposal: the bipartisan-supermajority exception exists precisely so a reform with cross-party support in the moment doesn't have to wait. North Carolina's SB 382 could not have cleared a two-thirds threshold requiring votes from members of more than one party. It passed and was overridden entirely on party lines. A reform responding to a documented failure that both parties' legislators recognize should be able to clear that bar without difficulty; a reassignment that can only pass on a party-line vote is, definitionally, the pattern this issue targets, not the urgent-reform case the objection describes.
The one place this doesn't fully close: a legislative supermajority that already exists along party lines, as North Carolina's Republican majority did in December 2024, could in principle secure the "votes from more than one party" threshold with a small number of defectors from the minority party rather than durable bipartisan agreement, satisfying the letter of the exception without its purpose. This issue doesn't have a mechanism that rules that out entirely, and any bright-line vote-count threshold will always be gameable at the margin by a large enough existing majority. What the supermajority requirement does guarantee is that a maneuver like North Carolina's, passed on a clean party-line vote with zero votes from the governor's own party, would have to find at least some support outside the party benefiting from the change, which is an imperfect floor rather than a complete solution.
State legislatures and governors of whichever party currently holds office bear the most direct and acute cost: a reassignment of election-administration authority they judge urgent cannot take effect immediately unless it clears a bipartisan-supermajority threshold, even where the legislature's own majority is confident the change is warranted. This issue accepts that friction as the price of distinguishing a considered reform from a partisan timing capture, on the reasoning that a change worth making should be able to find support beyond the party that benefits from it.
Voters in states where a timing-captured law is currently in effect while litigation continues, North Carolina's being the clearest current example, bear a diffuse cost: uncertainty about which body's decisions will ultimately be held to have had legal authority, and reduced confidence in election administration precisely at the institution built to protect that confidence. That cost is general rather than concentrated on any single voter, but it isn't hypothetical while the underlying constitutional question remains unresolved on appeal.
States that adopt this issue's preferred balanced-board model over a single elected chief election official bear a narrower accountability cost: voters lose the ability to remove a badly performing election administration in a single election, since a multi-member board with staggered or cross-appointed seats is harder to change all at once than one elected office. This issue accepts that cost as the tradeoff for a structure that can't flip control on a single election's outcome, the same tradeoff independent redistricting commissions already ask voters to accept in the states that use them, and one this issue does not impose on any state that prefers to keep an elected chief election official instead.
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