President Trump earlier this month repeated his call for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places,” he said. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” The next day, he added, “A state is an agent for the federal government in elections.”
The Framers would not have agreed. The Constitution does give Congress broad power to “make or alter” regulations about the time, place, and manner of elections. But at the same time, states were given primary control over elections and Congress was denied the power to determine voter qualifications. That’s because the Framers did not think election administration should be solely a federal endeavor. They sought to divide responsibility between the states and the federal government, to avoid the dangers of both federal military dictatorship and state hyper-partisanship. History has demonstrated the wisdom of their approach, and the Supreme Court has been skeptical of broad attempts to nationalize elections in the past.
In drafting the elections clause in 1787, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention attempted to balance their distrust of state legislatures as the source of partisan factions with their desire to maintain state control over voting qualifications. “The Legislatures of the States ought not to have the uncontrolled right of regulating the times places & manner of holding elections,” James Madison explained in a debate, according to notes taken at the time. He was concerned that partisan factions in a state might rig the electoral system to favor their own candidates. “Whenever the State Legislatures had a favorite measure to carry, they would take care so to mould their regulations as to favor the candidates they wished to succeed.”
Madison identified other “abuses” that might result, such as malapportionment. In 1787, South Carolina had a grossly malapportioned state legislature, which benefited slaveholders. The South Carolina delegates had proposed to deny the power of Congress to regulate the districts in their state, but their proposal failed. Other convention delegates, agreeing with Madison, said that congressional supervisory power over state elections was necessary to prevent voter fraud. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania worried that “the States might make false returns and then make no provisions for new elections,” while Rufus King of Massachusetts feared that without a power to supervise elections, Congress might be unable to assess the validity of elections. The Founders also thought that a uniform time for national elections would ensure there was always a quorum in the House, which was necessary in times of emergency.