Understanding Every Principle | #3: Protect Election Integrity
Who Counts the Votes Is Not a Technical Question. It Is the Question.
This is the third article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. The previous articles examined Principle 1: Safeguard Our Democratic System, and Principle 2: Limit Terms for Accountability. Today, we examine the mechanism on which all other principles ultimately depend.
Principle 3: Guarantee transparent, fair, and nonpartisan elections. Uphold certified results and let voters decide outcomes through lawful processes.1
In the spring of 2013, a man in Johnson County, Kansas, went to his local election office to register to vote. He was a United States citizen, born and raised. He had a driver’s license, a Social Security card, and a permanent address. What he did not have was a copy of his birth certificate, which had gone missing during a recent move, and a passport, which had expired years before. Kansas had just passed a new law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register. He was turned away. He was one of more than 31,000 eligible Kansas voters turned away under that law before federal courts struck it down in 2018. Across those same years, Kansas election officials found fewer than 30 instances of noncitizens attempting to register. More than a thousand legitimate voters were blocked for every single improper registration the law prevented.2
That story is not a Kansas story. It is the story of what is happening right now, across the entire country, on a much larger scale.
This is the third article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. The third principle is this: Guarantee transparent, fair, and nonpartisan elections. Uphold certified results and let voters decide outcomes through lawful processes.1 It is the principle on which all the others depend, because a country whose citizens cannot trust how their votes are counted has no reliable way to hold anyone accountable for anything. When elections stop working, everything else stops working with them.
What a Real Election Requires
Most Americans think of election integrity as a question about fraud: are people voting who should not be? That is a legitimate concern, and it deserves an honest answer. But it is only one piece of what makes an election genuine. A real election also requires that every eligible voter can cast a ballot without unreasonable obstacles, that the people running the election have no stake in its outcome, and that when the votes are counted, every candidate and every party accepts the result.
Remove any one of those conditions, and you do not have a flawed election. You have something that looks like an election but does not function like one.
Robert Dahl, one of the most respected democratic theorists of the twentieth century, argued that free and fair elections are not one feature of democracy among others. They are the central mechanism by which a self-governing people holds power accountable. His research identified several conditions required for elections to serve that purpose: the rules must apply equally to all voters, the institutions running the elections must operate free from partisan control, and losers must accept the results.3 Those three conditions are exactly what the Centercratic principle is designed to protect.1
Researchers at the Varieties of Democracy Institute, which tracks democratic health in more than 200 countries, have been watching the United States closely. Their 2026 report stated plainly that the 2026 midterm elections will be a critical test for this country, and that if election-specific indicators continue to decline, the United States’ already diminished standing as a functioning democracy will fall further still.4
What Is Happening Right Now
In October 2025, the Trump administration began filling federal election security positions with individuals who had previously worked to overturn the certified results of the 2020 election. According to reporting by ProPublica, CNN, and NBC News, at least 75 career officials with expertise in election security were dismissed, and nearly a dozen of those roles were filled with appointees who had actively challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 results.5 The people whose job is to protect the integrity of our elections were replaced by people who had publicly argued that a recent election should not have been certified.
That is a structural problem regardless of party. The integrity of any process that requires impartiality depends on the people running it having no stake in the outcome.
The administration has also issued executive orders that reach directly into the mechanics of voting. A March 2026 order directed the U.S. Postal Service to process mail-in ballots only for individuals on a federally verified citizenship list, an action that election law experts across the political spectrum described as unconstitutional, because the authority to administer elections belongs primarily to the states, not the White House.6 Multiple states filed legal challenges immediately, and federal courts were engaged on several fronts as this article was written.7
In Congress, the SAVE America Act passed the House in February 2026 and came to the Senate floor in March. The bill would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan legal research organization, found that more than 21 million Americans do not have ready access to the documents the bill would require, that roughly half of all Americans do not have a valid passport, and that millions more lack access to a certified copy of their birth certificate.8 The bipartisan Bipartisan Policy Center acknowledged that while noncitizen voting is already illegal under federal law and documented instances are rare, the bill as written could block large numbers of legitimate voters from participating if implemented without significant safeguards.9 The Kansas experience showed exactly how that plays out in practice. Now Congress is proposing the same approach for the entire country.2
It is worth saying directly: neither party has a clean record on this principle. Democrats have, in various states, supported redistricting arrangements drawn to protect incumbents rather than fairly represent voters. They have also, on occasion, resisted election security measures that had genuine merit, allowing the issue to become more politically divided than the evidence requires.10 Honest election integrity policy does not belong to either party. It belongs to the voters.
What Americans Are Actually Saying
Forty-five percent of American adults identify as political independents, the largest political identity in the country.11 Among that group, confidence that the November 2026 elections will be run fairly has fallen sharply.
A March 2026 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that overall voter confidence in fair and accurate elections dropped 10 percentage points since October 2024, falling from 76 percent to 66 percent.12 A separate survey of more than 11,000 eligible voters found that only 60 percent of Americans now believe their votes will be counted accurately in the 2026 midterms, with independent voters expressing even lower confidence at 57 percent.13
What independent voters cited as their primary concern was not noncitizen voting, and it was not voter suppression. It was misleading information. They did not know what the rules were, who was in charge of enforcing them, or whether the people running the elections could be trusted to do so impartially.12 That is not apathy. That is a rational response to a system in which the rules are simultaneously being contested in Congress, in the courts, and in the executive branch, while the officials responsible for running the elections have been replaced at the federal level with people who have a documented preference for a particular outcome. When voters cannot tell whether the game is being played straight, they stop believing the results. And when they stop believing the results, the elections stop doing the one thing they exist to do.
What the Centercratic Party Stands For
The Centercratic Party’s third principle rests on four concrete commitments, not talking points.1
The first is nonpartisan election administration. The people who run our elections, at every level of government, must have no stake in who wins. That means restoring the career election security professionals who were dismissed and replacing politically motivated appointees with individuals whose only qualification for the job is competence and impartiality.5
The second is defending the constitutional design. The Constitution gives primary responsibility for running elections to the states, not the federal executive branch. That division was deliberate. It ensures that no single administration can control the entire electoral system. Federal involvement in elections should be limited to providing resources, security support, and uniform rights protections, not to dictating who is eligible to vote or how states must process ballots.6
The third is an evidence standard for any restriction on voter access. Any law that makes it harder to vote must be justified by documented evidence of a real and significant problem, must be the least restrictive way to solve that problem, and must treat all eligible voters equally regardless of their income, age, or documentation status. The systematic review of noncitizen voting claims conducted by the Center for Election Innovation and Research found that the overwhelming majority of such claims, when properly investigated, turn out to be data errors rather than intentional fraud.14 Policy that restricts access for millions of legitimate citizens in order to address a problem that the evidence does not support is not election integrity. It is a different kind of problem.
The fourth is unconditional acceptance of certified results. A candidate or party that refuses to accept a certified election result, unless a court finds actual fraud sufficient to change the outcome, has not simply lost an election it disagreed with. It has broken the foundational agreement that makes democratic governance possible at all. The Centercratic standard applies in both directions, without exception, regardless of which party is doing the refusing.1
What Happens When This Fails
Countries do not typically lose free elections in a single dramatic moment. What the historical record shows, from Hungary to Venezuela, is a gradual process: first, doubt is planted about whether elections can be trusted. Then, the people responsible for running elections are replaced with loyalists. Then, the rules are changed in ways that make it harder for opposition voters to participate. Each step is defended as a reform. Each step makes the next step easier.15
The Varieties of Democracy Institute’s data shows that the United States’ score on the Clean Election Index, which measures whether elections are actually free and fair rather than just formally held, has been declining since 2016. The primary driver of that decline is not an increase in actual fraud, which remains rare, but an increase in political pressure on election administration.16 The 2026 midterms will be the first real test of whether that trend continues, levels off, or begins to reverse.17
A Vote That Means Something
There is a version of this debate in which election security and voter access are treated as opposing goals, where protecting the ballot means restricting it. That version of the debate is wrong, and the evidence says so. The goal is an election system in which every eligible voter can participate easily, every fraudulent vote is prevented, and the people running the process answer to no one except the law. Those three things are not in tension. They are the same goal, described from three different angles.
The 45 percent of Americans who belong to neither party understand this, even if they do not always have the language for it.11 What they want, and what they have never fully received from either major party, is an election system they can trust. Not one designed to help their side win. One designed to let the voters decide.
That is not a radical idea. It is the only idea on which democratic self-government can stand.
Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 4: One Law for All, and why equal justice under the law is inseparable from the question of whether elections, once held, actually mean what they are supposed to mean.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Notes
1 Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/
2 Associated Press. “Kansas Once Required Voters to Prove Citizenship. That Didn’t Work Out So Well.” December 29, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/kansas-noncitizen-voting-proof-of-citizenship-50d56a0b8d1f0fde15480aab3db67f4f
3 Dahl, Robert A. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press, 1971. Discussed in: Democracy Paradox. “Thoughts on Robert Dahl’s Polyarchy.” May 2021. https://democracyparadox.com/2021/05/29/thoughts-on-robert-dahls-polyarchy/
4 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. “Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline Unprecedented.” Press Release, March 16, 2026. https://www.v-dem.net/news/press-release-democratic-backsliding-reaches-western-democracies-with-us-decline-unprecedented/
5 ProPublica / CNN / NBC News. “Trump Elevates Election Deniers to Positions with Key Roles in 2026 Midterms.” April 14, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-elevates-election-deniers-positions-183108906.html
6 Lawfare Media. “What Is Trump’s ‘Election Integrity’ Order Even Trying to Achieve?” January 3, 2026. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-is-trump-s-election-integrity-order-even-trying-to-achieve
7 Chapman, Paul J. “Today’s Essential Political News.” The Center Voter, March 31, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/todays-essential-political-news-4minute-8e8
8 Brennan Center for Justice. “New SAVE Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans from Voting.” February 2026. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting
9 Bipartisan Policy Center. “Five Things to Know About the SAVE America Act.” April 6, 2026. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/
10 Bipartisan Policy Center / R Street Institute / Institute for Responsive Government. “United in Security: How Every State Protects Your Vote in 2026.” February 2026. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/united-in-security-how-every-state-protects-your-vote-2026/
11 Gallup. “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents.” January 11, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx
12 American Democracy Minute. “A March 2026 Poll Shows an Erosion of Voter Confidence in Elections.” March 17, 2026. https://www.americandemocracyminute.org/wethepeople/2026/03/18/a-march-2026-poll-shows-an-erosion-of-voter-confidence-in-elections
13 The Hill. “60 Percent Say They’re Confident Midterms Will Be Counted Fairly.” February 17, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5742131-voter-confidence-decline-midterms/
14 Center for Election Innovation and Research. “Update: Review of Claims of Noncitizen Registrants and Voters.” February 2026. https://electioninnovation.org/research/noncitizen-analysis-update/
15 TODA Institute. “Electoral Integrity and the 2026 United States Midterm Elections.” January 22, 2026. https://toda.org/publications/policy-briefs-and-reports/report-267-full-text/
16 Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. “The US Elections and Democracy: Election Intimidation and Violence.” November 2024. https://www.v-dem.net/news/the-us-elections-and-democracy-election-intimidation-and-violence/
17 Brennan Center for Justice. “The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election.” August 2025. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trump-administrations-campaign-undermine-next-election