Rewiring Democracy Now: How AI Is Helping to Write a New Constitution in the U.S. Virgin Islands

This article was written with Bruce Schneier and originally published by The Renovator on 2026-09-19 as the fifth part of a multi-part series updating stories from our book, Rewiring Democracy.

This is the fifth in a multi-part series by Sanders and Schneier going into depth on real-world examples of democratic technologies from their book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Their first piece was about the Japanese digital democracy party “Team Mirai,” their second was about the Swiss Public AI model “Apertus,” the third was about the civic technologists of Open Knowledge Brazil, and the fourth was about the deliberative technology platform being developed by CrownShy in Scotland.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve social and political change has presented itself in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Imani Daniel is not about to let it pass. For the sixth time in territorial history, the territory has convened a constitutional convention. Daniel’s bold claim is that theirs is “the first digital constitutional convention anywhere in the world.” And for the first time we are aware of, AI is being used as an assistive tool in structuring a new government.

Daniel framed the stakes for the convention as no less than the self-determination of her people. She says that the USVI is continuously thrust into a future it has no say over. The Islands are at the forefront of global tensions: conflict between the U.S. and Venezuela, climate change, fossil fuels, global communications, birthright citizenship, public corruption, the Epstein files, and even the Trump administration’s threatened acquisition of Greenland. And yet they have no voting representation in Congress, the U.S. presidency or the United Nations.

In order to understand why the USVI is drafting a new constitution, why the Convention has used AI in its work, and why Daniel—a self-described community organizer and “futurist”—is part of the process, we spoke to her this Spring.

Daniel told us that her ancestry in the USVI is traceable through seven generations, as far back as organized records go. Her childhood schoolhouse was in the same Anglican church her grandmother attended. In addition to being a delegate to the convention, Daniel is executive director of VIISION Inc., a nonprofit organizing volunteer networks for social impact in the USVI, and a 2025-2026 Obama Foundation USA Leadership Fellow.

Daniel’s relative, Virgin Islands Sen. Percival Reese, participated in the USVI’s first two constitutional conventions. A petition was circulated in 2020 to revive the constitutional convention process for a sixth time, which led to Daniel and her fellow delegates being elected in 2024. Daniel is now running for Senate in the USVI herself as an independent candidate and co-founder of the Future movement, a slate of candidates running on a shared platform they articulate as: “Honest government. Economic dignity. A future to come home to.”

The need for economic prosperity and self-determination is critical to Daniel and so many other Virgin Islanders of her generation, and animates much of the work of the Convention. After doing her undergraduate and graduate work in political science and psychology at Johns Hopkins University, Daniel returned to the islands in 2015.

She was there when the catastrophic Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria hit the islands in 2017. Following the disaster, she became director of the St. Thomas Recovery Team, a nonprofit that, Daniel told us, managed more than $5 million in recovery grants. She said their work included volunteer organizing, building solar power stations or community gardens, and training in a way that supplemented and met gaps in the response from FEMA and local agencies.

The government disaster response in the Virgin Islands left much to be desired, as the recovery efforts in Florida and Puerto Rico attracted far more attention and resources. To add insult to injury, Daniel related, COVID hit after the disaster recovery resources were pulled back from the islands. The lesson she took was that the USVI cannot remain dependent on federal goodwill.

Daniel told us she feels a responsibility to make the territory’s new constitution inclusive, equitable, and forward-looking. The USVI has spent more than 70 years governed under U.S. federal law without their own constitution. Their government is organized under a structure first established by Congress in 1936 and updated in the Revised Organic Act of 1954. Before the U.S. acquired the territory in 1917 for $25 million—less than a thousand dollars per resident—it spent more than two centuries under Danish colonial rule.

While using AI to augment legislative processes has been widespread for years, Daniel believes the Virgin Islanders are the first to use it to design a government itself, in a constitutional convention process. She believes AI can expand who can contribute directly to designing democratic structures.

Daniel says the delegates have taken inspiration from reviewing the constitutions of other democracies, particularly New Zealand, Palau, and other Pacific islands. She reports that the delegates started from some shared principles: that the constitution should enshrine protections for people, for the collective population, and for the Earth. That led them to consider issues like intergenerational accountability. She cited, for example, the constitutional precedent established in Montana that the rights of youth to a healthful environment create responsibilities for the long-term management of climate change. (More frequently, Daniel said, provisions of U.S. state constitutions served as anti-examples for them.) The Virgin Islanders are also thinking about obligations to transmit culture, identity, and heritage across generations.

Daniel said that AI helps the delegates—some of whom have no legal training—translate big ideas like these into concrete constitutional language. When a delegate raises a concern about wording, about interpretation, or about the potential for unintended consequences, they use AI to redraft.

She says that the delegates have had plenty of disagreement about the content of the policies they are drafting, but not so far about whether and how technology should be used. Of the convention’s 15 delegates, most are in their 70s or older. Daniel is one of three millennial delegates. She says that the “digital natives” are trying to be inclusive in introducing the technology to their colleagues. They have held office hours on using AI and sometimes coach others over the phone.

As they are proposing a replacement to a legal structure first established in 1936, Daniel says that AI is being used to help them “jump forward 100 years.” At least one independent authority who has seen their draft—the constitutional scholar Richard Albert, retained by the convention as a legal advisor—assessed that their current version is “more ambitious than any state constitution currently in force.” They are seeking to move the USVI from a regressive to a progressive tax structure and designing a rebalance of power between their territorial legislature and executive. The current office of the governor inherited immense powers from the old structure of appointed naval governors. Daniel is cognizant that their pioneering use of technology, combined with their ambition, means they may be witness to the first unintended consequences of an AI-augmented state design.

The Virgin Islands does not have a reputation as a technology powerhouse. Daniel described the USVI as a digital desert. We connected with her during a rotating power blackout due to a fuel shortage that Daniel attributed to the U.S.-Iran war. But it has some structural factors that make it a likely location for the world’s first digital constitutional convention.

The first is geographic. The delegates are spread across three islands and cannot easily convene in person, so most of the work happens over Zoom and Google Docs.

Secondly, they are working against a ticking clock. The convention is charged with generating a draft constitution by February to face a popular vote in July. Daniel says AI has helped them go faster, comparing legal frameworks and constitutions across all states, all regions, and all islands, and to layer that analysis with the context of historical events and economic stressors. Daniel claims that the use of AI has compressed research processes that could take months of labor and unaffordable legal research into hours.

We asked Daniel how the constitution would have looked different if not for their use of AI. It’s a complex story because, she said, just about everything is different in this convention from the previous five. Rather than continue iterating on those previous drafts, they sought to do a ground-up rewrite as a 21st-century constitution, pushing back on the status quo of their colonial context as much as possible.

A contentious provision involves property tax exemption. Past conventions have sought to exempt ancestral Virgin Islanders from real property tax. The U.S. Department of Justice raised several concerns in 2010 that quashed that draft constitution, among them that an ancestral exemption would violate the 14th Amendment. The amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits preferential treatment based on race or ancestry.

Daniel said that the AI tool Claude helped the sixth convention make a breakthrough on this issue, identifying a different legal framework that would achieve a similar benefit targeted to this community. When we spoke to her, they were considering using a homestead exemption to reduce the tax burden on the primary residence of Virgin Islanders who have occupied their homes for a certain amount of time.

The delegates, Daniel says, have the best tools of any constitutional convention ever convened. They regularly use Claude as well as ChatGPT and Lovable, an AI-powered application builder. They often use ChatGPT to fact check Claude’s answers, or vice versa. While the convention itself is not operating web applications for use by anyone other than themselves, delegates have used Lovable to help them build voter engagement tools for the upcoming constitutional referendum.

A few weeks after we spoke to Daniel, the Virgin Islands Bar Association urged the convention to seek more (human) legal guidance, alleging that they had recruited insufficient expertise in relying only on Albert, their stateside legal advisor. Reportedly, several USVI lawyers have offered pro bono assistance. Albert has cautioned the delegates about the legal risks inherent to their approach. The draft he reviewed promised rights to healthcare and housing, for example, which he characterized as enormous financial liabilities. The constitutional draft also includes rights to strike and animal wellbeing, which Albert noted could conflict with federal law and U.S. Constitutional provisions.

Albert also said the draft constitution’s provisions around data and AI would be novel for the U.S. Following in the mold of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and AI Act, the draft includes a right to control over the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data, as well as a right to transparency and fairness in algorithmic decision-making affecting human rights.

If the sixth convention is not successful in ratifying a constitution, Daniel predicts it will be a long time before they have another shot. She points to the price tag of the referendum vote, swirling geopolitical storms, and voter apathy as reasons that would delay a seventh effort.

It’s hard to know how Virgin Islanders will respond in next year’s vote on the draft constitution, which has not yet been presented publicly as of this writing. A March poll conducted by the University of Michigan found that 38% of residents did not yet know about the convention, and 63% of residents were generally unfamiliar with the convention process. But 65%—nearly a supermajority—said they believe it is important for the islands to ratify their own constitution.

That gives Daniel hope. She acknowledged the convention had not yet cultivated—whether with AI or purely human labor—public input on their constitution. Unlike the “Rewiring Democracy” stories we featured from Japan and Scotland, which focused on using AI to solicit and synthesize public input, the delegates were so far deliberating only among themselves.

Daniel has plans to do more public engagement in the near future. She promised to get out the vote “island style,” knocking on 90% of doors across the islands, using word of mouth, and taking to the radio airwaves—as well as using digital tools like Facebook and Whatsapp. She touts her participation in the constitutional convention in her Senate campaign, though the convention itself is nonpartisan. The convention must not only write a new constitution; it must also play a critical role in explaining to the public why they should care.