Here's why "nationalizing" our elections is a very bad idea
It's not just because Trump is the one suggesting it
Over the past week, President Trump has made more than a few statements about his ingenious idea to “nationalize” our voting and elections: to take power away from the states and localities who are currently largely in charge of making sure our elections run smoothly.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said on podcast last week. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
The next day, after Trump’s press secretary had to put out her 20,000th statement of the last year denying that Trump was saying what he was definitely saying, the president doubled down: If states “can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over,” he said in the Oval Office. “Look at some of the places — that horrible corruption on elections — and the federal government should not allow that,” he added. “The federal government should get involved.”
Trump also argued that “a state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” adding, “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”
Our president doesn’t know why the federal government doesn’t run our elections from top to bottom. But since he may not be alone, I figured I’d offer a brief explanation of why we do it this way — and why, especially now, it would be a disaster to switch to federal control.
For one thing, it’s in the U.S. Constitution. It’s not often the Constitution is so abundantly and unambiguously clear about the rules, but this is a special case. Article 1, Section 4 reads as follows: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of ch[oo]sing Senators.”
In other words, the states (through their legislatures) are presumed to have dominion over election law. Wherever it is you vote, you have certain rules about when your primary elections take place, or how long before Election Day you need to be registered, or whether and how you can vote by mail. Most or all of these rules were made by your state’s legislature at some point, because the Constitution says they have primary authority.
For example, here’s how states differ in their approach to voter identification laws (i.e. what you need to present when you show up to vote), as of 2026:
Article 1, Section 4 also makes clear that Congress (not, I might add, the President) does have a role, even if it’s secondary. They can and do make law in this area. Historically, it’s been done to expand the franchise through Constitutional amendments like the 15th (granting African-American men the right to vote) or the 19th (granting women that right). They can also make changes through regular ol’ legislation, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Congress outlawed discriminatory Jim Crow-era voting practices like literacy tests that many state legislatures had put into place to suppress the votes of Black Americans.
More recently, Congress has made important technical changes that states now have to live by. For example, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 made sweeping election reforms that set mandatory minimum standards for states to follow in a few key areas of election administration to make elections easier and more secure for voters to participate in. Most notably, they forced states using outdated punch card ballots (like those used in Florida during the contested 2000 presidential election) to switch to better, more secure technology.
But states and localities have another responsibility that Congress doesn’t. Because states don’t just conduct our elections by making law about absentee ballots, voter ID, or all manner of other features. They also delegate control over the administration of our elections to the local level, usually in the form of county clerks or boards of election. By administration, we mean the actual nuts and bolts of how things play out when the voting happens: everything from voting machines, to poll workers to the counting of ballots, to the reporting of results on their websites. Roughly each county in the U.S. does its own thing in this area, tabulating and counting votes from their particular polling places, so long as they’re in accordance with state law.
To summarize: states have primacy over election law; and as long as these laws don’t violate existing federal law or the constitution, states are good to go virtually however they please. Local governments like counties actually conduct the elections themselves according to state and federal law. And in all cases, the feds aren’t supposed to intervene unless they have a really good reason to; and when they do, they do so through Congress — not, as Trump has proposed, through presidential executive orders.
Of course, just because something’s “in the Constitution” doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Maybe Trump is right. Maybe our decentralized system of election administration is a huge problem. After all, it was those dang punch card ballots in Florida that caused all those problems for Al Gore to begin with. Plus, slow ballot counting in states like Arizona have made it difficult to get clarity on the winner of a few important elections in recent years. Why not hand things over to to the feds?
The main reason we shouldn’t do that is, ironically, the topic Donald Trump seems concerned about above all others: election security.
For years — decades at this point — Trump has pushed one conspiracy theory after another about voter fraud. I won’t list them all because there’s not enough space, but suffice to say he’s made a lot of accusations with not a lot of evidence.
The latest “threat” has been voting on the part of undocumented immigrants. But the actual data used by the administration, from the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, showed evidence for only about 1,600 cases of voter fraud nationwide over the past 43 years; and of these, only about 100 (again, over four-plus decades) were instances of non-citizens attempting to vote.
But thankfully, we can rest easy about voter fraud even without these studies. That’s because the decentralization of our election system is one major reason we can wholly discount these allegations of massive, national-level fraud, which is probably the biggest reason why nationalizing elections in the way Trump is suggesting is such a bad idea. Put simply, the part of our system Trump is attacking is the main thing that’s keeping elections secure to begin with.
Why is decentralized election administration more secure? Senator John Thune, of all people — the Republican majority leader in the Senate — gave us a pretty concise explanation why when he rejected Trump’s call to nationalize elections: “I’m a big believer in decentralized and distributed power,” Thune said. “And I think it’s harder to hack 50 election systems than it is to hack one. In my view, at least, that’s always a system that has worked pretty well.”
This is the reason why doing away with decentralized election administration is a bad idea. Decentralization is the election security equivalent of not putting all your eggs in one basket. It’s the same reason financial advisors suggest diversifying your assets, rather than sinking all your savings into one company. If something illegal or untoward does happen with the vote count, or there are ballot irregularities, then it only affects one relatively small jurisdiction, and doesn’t “infect” the other 3,000-plus counties in the U.S.
To put it more plainly: the system spreads things out so that (for example) if you’re a Russian hacker trying to manipulate our elections, you’d probably want to hack a few million voting machines to make an impact. But aside from the fact that hacking even one voting machine is practically impossible to do to begin with, you wouldn’t be able to do it by just hacking into one central mainframe, because there isn’t any; you’d have to get into thousands of different systems across thousands of different jurisdictions across the country.
Voting and counting ballots in this decentralized way does come with drawbacks that shouldn’t be ignored. For some states are ridiculously slow when it comes to counting votes (looking at you, California), whereas other states are much faster. This can unfortunately feed into false beliefs about the fraudulence of late-counted ballots, especially when they happen to favor one candidate or another, even if nothing at all is amiss.
But a secure vote count that we can trust is well-worth the wait. It’s why it didn’t work when Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State in 2020 to beg him to “find” another 12,000 votes so he could win the state. It’s why it didn’t work when Trump organized state legislators in swing states to try to go against the will of their voters after the fact.
And to me, the best illustration of the dangers of centralizing election counting is in the one major instance in which the federal government does have in presidential elections: the verification of the Electoral College vote following presidential elections. Following the election itself and the meeting of the Electoral College’s “slates” of electors to cast votes, the states send their vote counts to Washington for verification by Congress and the Vice President.
This ceremony typically happens on January 6th after the election. And so if, hypothetically, a sitting president wanted to undermine our whole system and attack a nationwide election results, this would be the place to do it: one location where all the votes are being counted, and where you have the best chance to affect the outcome, even if it means siccing a mob on the Capitol building.
Decentralized elections are exactly what kept Trump from stealing the 2020 election himself. Maybe that’s why he’s so ready to kill that system.
If you want to hear more about this topic, I’d encourage you to check out the most recent episode of the podcast I recently launched with my co-author, SoRelle Gaynor, called Highway to Hill. It releases every Friday, and you can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your pods.
If we’re going to nationalize election process (or even if we’re not), what about nationalizing the vote for US President and remove the electoral college process?