@goat Feds just nationalize Fed elections. States do their own however they want for state offices props etc. So yes separate.
Yeah, but they can't, in practice. The states still have the authority to regulate fed elections unless Congress specifically supercedes them. And when it comes to qualifications for voting for House elections, Congress can't supercede them.
In theory, I'm all for a national election system. I'm just saying it can't be done neatly in practice under our current constitution.
@goat Exactly re Congress. I’m not sure Trump knows what he’s talking about when he says nationalize. TPM elections prescribed in each state by the legis etc. But Congresscan override state with federal election legislation. So you get house and senate to pass new laws and you’ve effectively federalized elections. I think that’s what Trump is getting at.
@goat Exactly re Congress. I’m not sure Trump knows what he’s talking about when he says nationalize. TPM elections prescribed in each state by the legis etc. But Congresscan override state with federal election legislation. So you get house and senate to pass new laws and you’ve effectively federalized elections. I think that’s what Trump is getting at.
They are still begging for a fight in which, say, California enfranchises noncitizens, and they can't get around the qualifications clause. Isn't worth this fight just to move from one ugly system to another. Let the states keep doing it.
@goat Maybe. In light of the last elections my instinct is in favor of uniformity. That said I don’t know enough about the minutiae of election procedures logistics etc to know for certain that my instinct is right.
@goat Maybe. In light of the last elections my instinct is in favor of uniformity. That said I don’t know enough about the minutiae of election procedures logistics etc to know for certain that my instinct is right.
My instinct is to agree with you, but I just don't think we can implement it correctly without a constitutional amendment.
Anyone that still thinks that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump is a moron and/or mentally unstable.Trump craves unchecked power. The prospect of the House flipping in November is enormously unsettling for him and he’ll do everything he can (including sending the National Guard to key districts, seizing voting machines, stirring the pot and finding some reason for invoking the Insurrection Act, delaying the vote or the counting of the vote) to keep that from happening. The president, constitutionally, has no power with respect to elections but that won’t stop him. He will likely defy the Constitution and the only guardrail will be the courts. We’ll see how that goes.
I’m not pulling this from thin air. He said last month he should have used the National Guard to seize voting machines in 2020. He called yesterday for a Republican “take over” of elections in “many” places. His Justice Department is seeking full state voter roll data, and they’re suing at least 24 states that are resisting. He’s apparently personally overseeing the search of voter records in Fulton County GA and spoke directly with FBI agents on the ground there yesterday. He’s still obsessed with his election loss in 2020 - - the one where he failed on every legal challenge and scores of audits and recounts. Last week he reposted discredited conspiracy theories as to why he lost that baselessly implicated Italy, China, Switzerland, the CIA and the FBI. He has “joked” about canceling elections during war. In an interview last month with Reuters, he said “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
It’s time for reasonable people to speak out. Enough with this bullshit.
Exactly. This is how the Premier in the Soviet Union got 99% of the vote. Same thing happens in many third wild countries and dictatorships that claim democracy.It would still be patchwork. Instead of state and local officials administering elections, you'd have feds who had to specialize in the intricacies of the state they were assigned to, since there are slight variations from state to state. Unless you want the feds to overhaul the entire system, make global restrictions for felony disenfranchisement, etc., and even then you would run into thorny issues because, for example, the feds would not have the power to overrule the states' authority to set qualifications for electors to the House, at the least, so you could end up in a situation where you are handing out different ballots to different voters depending on whether they are allowed to vote for state races only, or state and House races only, or all of them. In the long run, it might become even more complicated than it is now.
Patchwork is good.
"A remarkable thing about election law in America is how decentralized it is. It relies on obscure local officials such as county canvassing boards, along with armies of community volunteers . . . Centralizers and systemizers might call this a patchwork quilt. What it also is . . . is a source of deep resilience. Part of this is practical: with dozens of voting systems in use, if a newly introduced machine is overly subject to breakdown, at least it isn't causing havoc everywhere at once. If some states adopt a bad or inefficient practice . . . they can profit from the example of [another state] that has implemented more efficient methods after its own costly experience. Far more important, it prevents a power from being centralized that would be dangerously tempting to demagogues and authoritarians. We are so lucky that elections have never been federalized. No one in Washington can give orders to fire local election board officials.
"I hadn't seen it when I spoke but economist Steve Landsburg had recently written a superb opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal making this point better than I had: 'Imagine a future presidential election in which the incumbent refuses to concede and enlists the full power of the federal government to overturn the apparent democratic outcome. Now imagine that the election in question is actually run by a federal agency or by some nationwide quasi-governmental authority charged with collecting and aggregating the results from all 50 states. I don't know about you but I might worry a bit about the pressure that could be brought to bear on that single authority.'"
The Framers Wisely Left Election Practice Decentralized | Cato at Liberty Blog
Exactly. This is how the Premier in the Soviet Union got 99% of the vote. Same thing happens in many third wild countries and dictatorships that claim democracy.Patchwork is good.
"A remarkable thing about election law in America is how decentralized it is. It relies on obscure local officials such as county canvassing boards, along with armies of community volunteers . . . Centralizers and systemizers might call this a patchwork quilt. What it also is . . . is a source of deep resilience. Part of this is practical: with dozens of voting systems in use, if a newly introduced machine is overly subject to breakdown, at least it isn't causing havoc everywhere at once. If some states adopt a bad or inefficient practice . . . they can profit from the example of [another state] that has implemented more efficient methods after its own costly experience. Far more important, it prevents a power from being centralized that would be dangerously tempting to demagogues and authoritarians. We are so lucky that elections have never been federalized. No one in Washington can give orders to fire local election board officials.
"I hadn't seen it when I spoke but economist Steve Landsburg had recently written a superb opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal making this point better than I had: 'Imagine a future presidential election in which the incumbent refuses to concede and enlists the full power of the federal government to overturn the apparent democratic outcome. Now imagine that the election in question is actually run by a federal agency or by some nationwide quasi-governmental authority charged with collecting and aggregating the results from all 50 states. I don't know about you but I might worry a bit about the pressure that could be brought to bear on that single authority.'"
The Framers Wisely Left Election Practice Decentralized | Cato at Liberty Blog
It's not just internal demagogues / authoritarians. If you federalize the process, you are creating one point of attack for a foreign power to interfere. If there is a single flaw that can be infiltrated, you can change the course of the election outcome.
By making it 50 different systems, the likelihood of outside tampering that can truly affect the outcome is limited that much more.
It's not just internal demagogues / authoritarians. If you federalize the process, you are creating one point of attack for a foreign power to interfere. If there is a single flaw that can be infiltrated, you can change the course of the election outcome.
@squeakyclean Good point.