Was Aangad Singh Robbed of a $250,000 Civics Prize?

“Which amendment ended slavery?”

“Thirteenth,” Aangad Singh, a 15-year-old from Milford, Connecticut, answered confidently in front of a crowd of judges, contestants, and parents during the final lightning round at the inaugural Presidential 1776 Award civics competition on June 9 in Washington, D.C. The competition aimed to celebrate 250 years of America.

Three weeks later, while sitting with his family and Sam Fortier, a NOTUS reporter, in his uncle’s Toronto home, Singh watched himself on TV as the competition finally streamed. He was in disbelief. A red X flashed onscreen: his answer had been marked wrong. Surely, there must have been a mistake. 

 “The [auto-generated] subtitles [from the show] clearly caught ‘the 13th Amendment,’” Singh told The Juggernaut from a car with his family on a much-needed vacation to Los Angeles. 

But the judges the James Madison Foundation had chosen ruled Singh’s answer incorrect. While seemingly inconsequential, this decision, according to his family’s reconstruction of his scores, might have cost Aangad his place among the top three finalists and part of the $250,000 prize. Was this just a scoring error, or a deeper case of prejudice? Does it matter what the winner of America’s first civics presidential contest looks like? The Juggernaut spoke to the Singh family, one of the world’s top constitutional law experts, and reporter Sam Fortier; watched the contest; and reviewed the Singhs’ scoring sheet to piece together what might have happened.