On Sept. 19, The Renovator ran an article on VICC, featuring its use of AI. The article is How AI is Helping to Write a New Constitution in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

I applaud the Renovator for running this article on USVI, and I've mentioned USVI to the Renovator's editor multiple times. I also recommended Secretary Daniel as a speaker last fall for a Harvard Law School class covering constitutional conventions.

Needless to say, I'm excited about what VICC is doing, even if I'm at times quite critical.

Here is my posted comment:

For comprehensive information about USVI’s constitutional convention, see The USVI Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse at usvi.concon.info.

 

For more than 20 months since the convention first convened publicly, the Virgin Islands Constitutional Convention (VICC) has adamantly refused to share its draft constitution with the public. This Renovator article alludes to this when it observes, “[USVI Convention Secretary Daniel] acknowledged the convention had not yet cultivated—whether with AI or purely human labor—public input on their constitution.”

 

To my knowledge, VICC is the most secretive constitutional convention in U.S. history—and the U.S. has held more than 250 state constitutional conventions since 1776 (see, e.g., see the U.S. State Con-Con Papers). In addition to refusing to publish its draft constitution, it has refused to make its public meeting agendas, minutes, Zoom recordings, and delegate discussion documents available to the public. Furthermore, VICC delegates have also begun communicating through a password-protected software program. This is ironic given that several VICC leaders, including the president, publicly claim to be champions of transparency and public participation.

 

That said, Secretary Daniel deserves credit for distributing public meeting notices via an email list from January 2025 until the end of 2025. However, this email list was abandoned at the beginning of 2026 and replaced with selective disclosure to favored local media outlets, which may or may not post meeting notices in a timely manner. As a result, key public meetings, though nominally public, have effectively blocked public participation, especially from disfavored participants.

 

None of this implies that some of the secrecy is not well-founded. VICC has been discussing the risks of litigation stemming from various provisions in its proposed constitution, and it understandably wants to avoid aiding potential opponents and litigants. It has also been discussing an ambitious, expensive PR plan to sell the convention’s work to the public, which is another highly sensitive topic.

 

I have diligently covered the enabling legislation for the convention and the convention itself for more than four years. Indicative of the extraordinary self-sufficiency among VICC delegates is that when I emailed them my Renovator article—complete with an addendum (see https://jhsnider970335.substack.com/p/as-america-turns-250-were-forgetting) on how a modern statement of the right to constituent power could be embedded in VICC’s proposed constitution—I received no response, even after more than three weeks. While I believe VICC, with the help of AI, has likely designed a state-of-the-art constitution regarding some of its articles, it could ultimately mirror Ecuador’s Constitution: full of grand rights, including a public right to information, but entirely lacking the structural provisions required to make them enforceable.