Congressional Elections Modernization Act¶
Why CEMA Does Not Address Presidential Elections¶
The Congressional Elections Modernization Act (CEMA), hereafter referred to as "the Act," reforms how Americans elect their members of Congress. It replaces winner-take-all, single-member districts with multi-member districts using STAR Proportional Representation. It expands the House of Representatives to restore manageable district populations. It eliminates state-administered partisan primaries for federal offices through a Unified General Election Structure. It establishes algorithmically neutral redistricting to remove human discretion from the line-drawing process. Every provision addresses how Senators and Representatives are elected.
The Act does not address presidential elections. It does not mandate STAR voting for the presidential popular vote. It does not restructure the Electoral College. It does not prescribe how states select their presidential electors. This is not an oversight, a concession to political expediency, or a gap that future amendments will fill. It is an architectural choice grounded in the text of the Constitution -- a deliberate boundary drawn where the Constitution draws it.
This paper explains why.
The Constitutional Boundary¶
The Act's entire constitutional foundation rests on a single clause. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution -- the Elections Clause -- provides:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
Three features of this text matter. First, the scope is explicit: "Elections for Senators and Representatives." Not federal elections generally. Not elections for all federal offices. Elections for members of Congress. Second, the authority is sweeping: Congress "may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." The Supreme Court has repeatedly confirmed that this language grants plenary regulatory power over the mechanics of congressional elections. In U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995), the Court described the Elections Clause power as "comprehensive and preemptive." In Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), the Court held that the Clause's reference to "manner" encompasses voting systems, vote counting, and the drawing of district boundaries. In Ex parte Yarbrough (1884), the Court affirmed Congressional authority to protect the integrity of federal elections even against private interference. Third, the only limitation is narrow and specific: Congress may not prescribe the "Places of chusing Senators" -- a provision whose practical significance disappeared with the Seventeenth Amendment's establishment of direct Senate elections.
This is CEMA's foundation. Every provision of the Act -- STAR voting, STAR-PR, multi-member districts, Blind Districting, the Unified General Election Structure, the Electoral Science Office, ballot access reform, party recognition standards -- rests on the Elections Clause. The constitutional authority is not merely adequate; it is textually explicit, historically exercised, and judicially confirmed across two centuries of precedent.
Presidential elections rest on different constitutional text. Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 provides:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.
The structural difference is not subtle. For congressional elections, the Constitution establishes a default -- state legislatures prescribe the regulations -- and then grants Congress override authority to "make or alter" those regulations at any time. The directionality runs from state authority to federal supremacy. For presidential elector selection, the Constitution vests primary authority in state legislatures with no corresponding federal override. The word "Congress" does not appear. There is no "make or alter" clause. The directionality runs from the Constitution to the states, with Congress standing to the side.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized the breadth of state legislative power under Article II. In McPherson v. Blacker (1892), the Court held that the manner of appointing presidential electors "is exclusively under the control of the state legislatures" and that this power is "plenary." The Court noted that state legislatures could, if they chose, dispense with popular elections for presidential electors entirely and appoint them directly -- an option that would be unthinkable for congressional elections under the Elections Clause framework. More recently, in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020), the Court reaffirmed the breadth of state appointment power while upholding state laws binding presidential electors to vote for the candidate who won the state's popular vote.
Congress's only explicit constitutional power over presidential elections is limited to timing. Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 provides that "Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States." Congress has exercised this power by setting the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the date for presidential elections. But the power to set the time of elector selection is categorically different from the power to prescribe the manner of elector selection. The Constitution grants Congress the former and reserves the latter to the states.
This asymmetry is not accidental. The Framers designed two distinct electoral architectures for two distinct purposes. Congressional elections determine the composition of the national legislature -- the body that represents the people and the states in the lawmaking process. The Elections Clause ensures that Congress can standardize and improve how its own members are chosen, preventing state-level manipulation from distorting national representation. Presidential elector selection, by contrast, was designed as a state-level function precisely because the presidency was conceived as an office elected by the states through the intermediary of the Electoral College. Whether that design remains sound is a legitimate question. But it is a constitutional design question, not a statutory design question -- and the Act does not confuse the two.
What Congress Can and Cannot Do¶
The argument that Congress could extend STAR voting to presidential elections often proceeds by analogy: Congress has legislated in the space of presidential elections before, so it can do so again. The argument is superficially appealing but structurally flawed. Each instance of Congressional action regarding presidential elections rests on a constitutional hook other than the Elections Clause -- and none of those hooks supports mandating the voting method a state must use for its presidential popular vote.
Setting the date. Congress has set the uniform date for presidential elections since 1845. This is a straightforward exercise of the Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 time power. It tells states when to hold the election, not how to conduct it.
The Voting Rights Act. The VRA's application to presidential elections rests on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment enforcement powers -- Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment grant Congress authority to enforce the equal protection and voting rights guarantees through "appropriate legislation." The VRA prohibits discriminatory practices in all elections, including presidential elections, but it does so as an anti-discrimination measure, not as a structural regulation of elector appointment methods.
The Help America Vote Act. HAVA imposed equipment standards, provisional voting requirements, and voter registration procedures on states for all federal elections, including presidential elections. But HAVA operates primarily through the Spending Clause -- federal dollars conditioned on state compliance with federal standards. It regulates the administrative infrastructure of elections, not the method by which votes are tabulated and translated into outcomes. The difference between requiring optical scan machines and mandating STAR voting is not one of degree. It is one of kind.
The Electoral Count Reform Act. The ECRA, enacted in 2022, reformed the process by which Congress counts and certifies electoral votes. It operates under Congress's authority to implement the Twelfth Amendment and to regulate its own proceedings. It governs what happens after states have selected their electors -- the certification and counting process. It does not reach backward into how states conduct the popular vote that informs elector selection.
Campaign finance regulation. Federal campaign finance laws apply to presidential campaigns under a combination of constitutional authorities -- the Necessary and Proper Clause, the general welfare power, and anti-corruption rationales the Court has recognized as compelling governmental interests. Campaign finance regulation governs the funding of campaigns, not the method of voting.
The pattern is consistent. Every instance of Congressional action regarding presidential elections operates at the periphery of elector selection -- timing, anti-discrimination, administrative infrastructure, post-selection certification, campaign funding. None involves Congress telling a state how to tabulate votes for presidential electors. None prescribes the voting method a state must use for its presidential popular vote. The reason is simple: prescribing the manner of elector appointment is the core of the Article II state legislative power, and Congress has no textual authority to override it.
Mandating STAR voting for presidential elections would be qualitatively different from anything Congress has done before. It would not regulate the timing of elections (Article II time power), enforce anti-discrimination guarantees (Fourteenth/Fifteenth Amendment enforcement), condition federal funds on administrative standards (Spending Clause), reform the certification process (Twelfth Amendment implementation), or regulate campaign funding (Necessary and Proper Clause). It would directly prescribe the method by which states tabulate popular votes to determine the appointment of presidential electors -- the precise function that Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 assigns to state legislatures.
Why Not Stretch?¶
A sophisticated counterargument concedes the Elections Clause point but proposes alternative constitutional foundations. Congress could ground presidential STAR provisions in the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee, arguing that winner-take-all presidential elections deny equal protection to voters whose preferred candidate loses the state. Or Congress could invoke the Necessary and Proper Clause, arguing that uniform voting methods across federal elections are necessary to effectuate the Elections Clause power. Or Congress could read the Article II time power broadly, arguing that regulating the "Time of chusing the Electors" implicitly encompasses aspects of how electors are chosen.
These arguments are not frivolous. Serious constitutional scholars have advanced versions of each. But the Act declines to build on any of them, and the reasons are structural rather than academic.
The "policy brick" principle. The Act is designed to be structurally durable. Every provision rests on constitutional authority that is textually explicit, judicially confirmed, and historically exercised. The Elections Clause is not merely defensible -- it is the strongest possible foundation for electoral reform legislation. Congressional authority to regulate the manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives has been affirmed by the Supreme Court in cases spanning more than a century, from Ex parte Yarbrough in 1884 through Arizona State Legislature in 2015. No serious constitutional scholar disputes that the Elections Clause authorizes Congress to prescribe voting methods for congressional elections. The Act's constitutional position is not that it might survive judicial review. It is that challenging the Elections Clause authority to regulate voting methods for congressional elections would require overturning settled precedent that no current judicial philosophy -- originalist, textualist, or living constitutionalist -- has reason to disturb.
Introducing presidential provisions that rest on contested constitutional authority would weaken this position. Even with a severability clause ensuring that the invalidation of presidential provisions would not formally affect congressional provisions, the litigation dynamics would change. Defending provisions grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee or the Necessary and Proper Clause requires arguments that are plausible but not settled -- arguments that a court could accept or reject without contradicting established precedent. The Act's opponents would focus their litigation resources on these weaker provisions precisely because they are more vulnerable to challenge.
Precedent contamination risk. The most dangerous consequence of including presidential provisions is not that a court would strike them down. It is that a court, in the course of striking them down, would generate language about the limits of federal authority over election methods -- language that could be extracted from context and wielded against the congressional provisions in subsequent litigation.
Consider the scenario: a court correctly holds that the Fourteenth Amendment does not authorize Congress to mandate STAR voting for presidential elections because the manner of elector appointment is committed to state legislatures under Article II. The holding is narrow and correctly distinguished from the Elections Clause context. But the opinion contains passages about the importance of state sovereignty in election administration, the limits of Congressional power to restructure electoral systems, and the dangers of federal overreach in dictating how Americans vote. These passages, drafted with presidential elections in mind, become ammunition for opponents challenging the congressional provisions -- not because the legal arguments are parallel, but because the rhetoric is transferable. In a polarized judicial environment, rhetorical ammunition matters.
The Act avoids manufacturing this ammunition. By limiting its scope to the territory where its constitutional authority is uncontested, it denies opponents the opportunity to generate adverse judicial language in the course of challenging overextended provisions.
Scope coherence. The Act sits within the Congressional Modernization Framework. Its full title is the Congressional Elections Modernization Act. Its findings address Congressional dysfunction. Its provisions reform how Congress is constituted. Presidential elector selection is not congressional modernization. Including presidential provisions would blur the Act's identity, complicate its narrative, and create opportunities for opponents to characterize it as federal overreach rather than congressional self-governance -- which is precisely what Elections Clause legislation is.
Clean scope makes the Act easier to understand, easier to defend, and easier to implement. A state election administrator implementing the Act needs to understand one constitutional framework (the Elections Clause), one set of voting methods (STAR and STAR-PR), and one set of election types (congressional). Adding presidential elections would require administrators to navigate the interaction between Elections Clause authority and Article II authority, determine which provisions apply to which elections, and manage the possibility that presidential provisions are invalidated while congressional provisions remain in force. Complexity is the enemy of implementation, and unnecessary complexity is an unforced error.
What Presidential Electoral Reform Actually Requires¶
The question of how Americans should elect their president is important. The Electoral College -- a system in which the candidate who wins the most popular votes nationwide can and does lose the presidency, in which a handful of "swing states" receive the overwhelming majority of campaign attention and resources, and in which safe-state voters have functionally no influence on the outcome -- is difficult to defend on democratic grounds. Extending STAR voting to presidential elections is a worthy goal. But achieving it constitutionally requires tools the Act cannot provide.
Applying STAR voting to presidential elections in a constitutionally sound way requires one of two paths, each requiring a constitutional amendment. The first path replaces the Electoral College with a national popular vote conducted using a specified voting method -- eliminating state-by-state elector selection entirely and establishing a uniform national election for the presidency. The second path retains the Electoral College structure but grants Congress explicit authority over the manner of presidential elector selection, analogous to the Elections Clause authority Congress already holds over congressional elections. Either path requires a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures.
The Congressional Modernization Framework anticipates this division. The Act handles what ordinary legislation can reach -- congressional elections, where the Elections Clause provides clear and sweeping authority. A future constitutional amendment proposal would handle what ordinary legislation cannot reach -- presidential elector selection, where the Constitution reserves primary authority to the states. This is not an admission of defeat. It is a recognition that different structural problems require different structural tools.
The separation is also strategically sound. The Act demonstrates the viability of STAR voting in congressional elections. If STAR voting performs as electoral science predicts -- electing broadly supported candidates, reducing polarization incentives, enabling proportional representation through STAR-PR -- that track record becomes the strongest possible argument for extending the method to presidential elections through constitutional amendment. Attempting to impose STAR voting on presidential elections by statutory fiat, before the method has demonstrated its value in practice, would combine constitutional vulnerability with political overreach. The Act builds the evidentiary foundation; a constitutional amendment capitalizes on it.
The FCAO Parallel¶
The same scope logic that excludes presidential elections from the Act led to a parallel architectural decision in Revision 5.6: the extraction of the Federal Candidate Assessment Office from CEMA into a planned standalone statute under the Congressional Modernization Framework.
The FCAO is a candidate transparency mechanism. It administers non-qualifying professional competency examinations to federal candidates and publishes the resulting Candidate Knowledge Scores on the ballot. The FCAO applies to all federal candidates -- House, Senate, and presidential. Its constitutional basis is distinct from CEMA's: the Elections Clause grounds the disclosure requirement for congressional candidates, but extending FCAO examinations to presidential candidates requires additional constitutional analysis under Article II and the First Amendment.
Embedding the FCAO within an elections mechanics statute created two problems. First, it muddied the Act's constitutional narrative. CEMA's constitutional argument is clean and unified: every provision exercises Elections Clause authority to regulate the manner of congressional elections. The FCAO's application to presidential candidates introduced a second constitutional framework -- one that had not been fully developed and that touched the Article II territory CEMA otherwise avoids. Second, the FCAO's relationship to the Act's core provisions was organizational rather than structural. STAR voting, multi-member districts, Blind Districting, and the Unified General Election Structure are mechanically interdependent -- each provision reinforces and enables the others. The FCAO is mechanically independent. It applies to any election system. It does not depend on STAR voting, proportional representation, or multi-member districts. Placing it within CEMA was a convenience of legislative packaging, not a reflection of structural integration.
Extracting the FCAO into its own statute -- with its own constitutional authority section, its own scope definition, and its own legislative identity -- applies the same architectural discipline that governs the presidential scope decision. Each component of the Congressional Modernization Framework rests on the constitutional authority that supports it. CEMA rests on the Elections Clause. The FCAO statute will rest on whatever combination of Elections Clause authority, Article II authority, and First Amendment analysis its provisions require. Neither statute weakens itself by carrying provisions that belong in the other.
Conclusion¶
The Act reforms what the Constitution authorizes Congress to reform through ordinary legislation. It does not pretend that this authority extends further than it does. It does not invoke contested constitutional theories to reach objectives that settled authority cannot support. It does not gamble the constitutional security of its congressional reforms on the hope that courts will permit federal regulation of presidential elector selection methods.
The Elections Clause is explicit. Congress may at any time by law make or alter regulations for the election of Senators and Representatives. The Act exercises this authority -- comprehensively, ambitiously, and on constitutionally firm ground. Presidential elector selection is governed by a different constitutional provision, one that vests primary authority in state legislatures and provides no federal override mechanism. The boundary between these two regimes is not a judgment call. It is a line drawn in the constitutional text.
The absence of presidential elections from the Act is not a gap. It is a boundary, drawn where the Constitution draws it. The Act does not pretend to solve problems that require constitutional tools. It solves the problems that statutory tools can reach -- and it solves them durably, because it builds on constitutional ground that does not shift.
Works Cited¶
Chiafalo v. Washington, 591 U.S. 578 (2020).
Ex parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651 (1884).
McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1 (1892).
U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995).
Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, 576 U.S. 787 (2015).
U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 4 (Elections Clause).
U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 (Presidential Elector Clause).
U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 (Time of Choosing Electors).
U.S. Constitution, Amendment XII (Electoral Vote Counting).
U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV, Section 5 (Congressional Enforcement Power).
U.S. Constitution, Amendment XV, Section 2 (Congressional Enforcement Power).
Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, Pub. L. No. 117-328, Division P.
Help America Vote Act of 2002, Pub. L. No. 107-252, 116 Stat. 1666.
Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-110, 79 Stat. 437.
Revision history available in the raw file.
📥 Download this document (opens on GitHub -- click the ⬇ download button)
Prepared by Albert Ramos for The American Policy Architecture Institute