Wilfred Codrington has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Harvard Law and Policy Review). Here is the abstract:

Drafted in exceedingly sparing terms and notoriously difficult to amend, the U.S. Constitution is falling short in one of the most important functions of a government charter: establishing and maintaining a fair and just electoral framework-marked by rules that promote the values of equality, participation, competition, and transparency in elections. That is, the Constitution increasingly fails to preserve electoral democracy even as the nation’s systems for voting and elections are plagued by a cascade of problems. State constitutions, though not uniform, are uniformly easier to amend than the national charter and tend to be better stewards of electoral democracy. But state constitutions are typically an afterthought in discussions about American constitutionalism, if even thought of at all. In this context, however, they have something quite valuable to contribute. As this Article contends, there is an informal role that state charters can play, should play, and indeed, have played to nudge their federal counterpart in the right direction by helping to facilitate Article V amendments aimed at improving electoral democracy. The Article proceeds in three parts.

In Part I, the Article discusses two concepts that are central to constitutional democracies like ours: constitutional amendment and electoral democracy. It engages with prevailing scholarship on these topics to explain what they are, why they are so essential, and how they relate to and differ from each other. While the discussion in this Part is largely one based in theory, the discussion in Part II is mostly descriptive. It highlights how these two key concepts manifest differentially under America’s fifty-one constitutions. Part III, the final Part, builds on the theoretical and descriptive analyses in Parts I and II to introduce a novel concept, a “springboard amendment,” by which state constitutional reform can help to facilitate corresponding federal change through Article V. Then, drawing on history, it illustrates that springboarding actually occurs, again, focusing on amendments related to electoral democracy. Though clearly exhibiting favorable disposition to springboard amendments, especially given the difficulty of amending our Constitution, this part nevertheless acknowledges that springboarding could lead to negative outcomes, including through reference to the Redemption and Jim Crow periods that came on the heels of Reconstruction, undoubtedly the nadir for constitutional amendment and electoral democracy in the United States. The Article concludes with some musings about the obstacles to amendment and the role of the academy in the project of constitutional change in the hopes that its members will help promote constructive thinking and dialogue about constitutionalizing electoral democracy at the state and national levels.