The rules that will govern how Americans vote in the 2028 presidential election are on the ballot in 17 states this Tuesday — and the establishment press would rather talk about anything else.
The Honest Elections Project released a comprehensive ballot measure guide Monday, first reported by the Daily Caller, identifying 21 election-related measures across 17 states. The stakes are real: voter ID requirements, non-citizen voting bans, ranked-choice voting repeals, redistricting fights, and constitutional amendment thresholds all face voters this cycle. "The rules for the 2028 presidential election are on the ballot in states across the country this week," HEP Action Executive Director Jason Snead said in a statement. "Americans have two more years to argue about who should win the next presidential election. They have less than a week, however, to decide who will write many of its rules."
Meanwhile, NBC News devoted its midterm preview to five charts about the economy — inflation, gas prices, mortgage rates, home prices, and stock market gains. Not a single word about how ballots are cast, counted, or certified. The framing is clear: vote your wallet, don't ask questions about the machinery.
The HEP guide covers ground the mainstream press won't touch. Ten measures address voter ID and citizenship. Two target ranked-choice voting — the system that lets losing candidates win through ballot exhaustion and algorithmic reassignments. Two address redistricting. Five cover the rules for changing voting rules, including a Colorado amendment requiring ballot questions be written at an eighth-grade reading level and North and South Dakota measures requiring a 60 percent supermajority to amend state constitutions.
But even the HEP guide, useful as it is, stays within safe boundaries. The organization's website explicitly champions ending "vote harvesting" and foreign dark money in American elections. Yet the ballot measure guide itself does not feature any measures specifically targeting mail-in voting vulnerabilities or the organized collection of absentee ballots — the very mechanisms that have decided close races across the country. Those fights aren't on the ballot because the political class made sure they wouldn't be.
NBC's economic coverage tells its own story by omission. The network reports inflation outpaced wage gains, gas prices above $4, mortgage rates above 7 percent, and home prices up 57 percent since January 2020. All of it frames the election as a referendum on the economy — not on whether the election system itself is trustworthy. That is a choice, and it serves incumbents who benefit from low-information voting.
The question neither outlet answers: why are the vulnerabilities that actually determine outcomes in close races — mass mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and ranked-choice elimination rounds — so rarely put before voters as ballot measures? The people who write the rules have no incentive to let voters rewrite them.
Snead is right that the rules for 2028 are being written this week. What he doesn't say is how many of the rules that matter most were never put on the ballot at all.
