President Donald Trump has called for Republicans to "take over" or nationalize elections, which would upend 250 years of American electoral tradition and longstanding Republican opposition to the idea.
Trump pushed the notion on a podcast released last week by his former deputy FBI director, Dan Bongino.
"The Republicans should say, 'We want to take over,'" he said. "We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many - 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting."
To get a clearer picture of what the Constitution says on this point - and what such a proposal might entail, Decision Points reached out to Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the school's Elections Research Center.
The U.S. Constitution gives the states the lead role in conducting elections. Although the document also allows the federal government to set the regulations for administering elections, states are granted a lot of autonomy for running elections, even more if the offices on the ballot are not federal ones.
The details of elections are decided by and managed by states and local governments, but with guidance from federal laws. States make a wide variety of decisions about how elections are conducted, such as what voting machines will be used, how people become registered to vote, and what kind of identification is required of voters.
The federal government has increased its involvement in elections over the course of U.S. history. For example, in 1845 Congress determined that all states should begin using the same general election day in November. In the 1960s the Voting Rights Act put limits on what states and localities could do with elections if those changes harmed the voting rights of minority groups. In the 1990s and 2000s new federal laws provided more access to polls, implemented a "motor voter" requirement, required states to create statewide databases of voters, phased out some kinds of voting machines, and more. But even with these developments at the federal level, states are still granted substantial latitude to run elections as they wish.
Truly federalizing elections would be a step never before seen or seriously considered in U.S. history. Doing so would take away the autonomy of states and local governments to adapt election laws as they desire. It is difficult to even imagine how federalized election administration would work in the short term because it would require the federal government to create a substantial infrastructure to do things it has never done - such as maintain a national voter registration roll. And it would presumably eliminate variation across states and require adoption of national rules for everything from how long a person must be a resident of a state to vote there and whether a person is permitted to register to vote online.
There could be significant security threats from a nationalized election. The highly decentralized system used in the U.S. makes it exceptionally difficult for a bad actor such as a foreign adversary or a group wanting to rig an election to do so. There is no single database or network of voting machines that can be infiltrated to manipulate election results. But with unified control in Washington, there would be a single target.
Republicans might be tempted by the idea of the Trump administration taking over election administration in "blue states," but it runs against long-held conservative support for states' rights and would not be so welcome the next time a Democrat sits in the White House.