By making sure no public office is ever decided without a choice on the ballot.
The League of Constitutional Voters is a nonpartisan membership organization working to ensure that no public office is decided without a choice. We present every candidate to the public on equal terms, and we recruit, train, and encourage citizens — especially young citizens — to stand for office.
Because the whole design rests on one line of it.
The Constitution and the constitutions of the fifty states set up a system that assumes a choice. Terms end. Seats open. Citizens step forward. Voters decide. Every part of that machine still works — except the part where a citizen steps forward. That part has quietly stopped in most of the country, and nobody is legally required to notice.
We are not constitutional in the sense of having opinions about what the document means. We have none, as an organization, and we never will. We are constitutional in the sense that we do the one job the document assumes somebody is doing: making sure there is a choice on the ballot.
Washington already requires every officeholder to swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States and to the Constitution of the State of Washington. We don’t need to add a pledge on top of an oath. We just need to make sure someone is standing there to take it.
Exactly three things. This is the entire list.
Not a preferred choice. A choice. Two names, minimum, so that the seat is won and not merely assigned.
Whoever they are. Whatever they think. However unlikely they are to win.
The information is public. It is also scattered, jargoned, and buried. That is a solvable problem, and solving it is most of our work.
One number, published every June, forever. It will read something like this:
Forty-one races in our territory were headed for no contest. Seventeen now have a choice. An illustration of the format. We haven’t run a cycle yet — the first real number publishes in June 2027.
That’s the annual report. That’s the press release. That’s the membership pitch. We will publish it whether it’s a good year or a bad one.