Two recent events have cast a bright spotlight on America’s fairly unique arrangement of delegating most details of federal elections to the states. First, Gov. Chris Christie issued a writ for an October special election to fill the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat, rather than holding it during the November general election. Then the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s requirement of proof of citizenship for voter registration as pre-empted by the federal “motor voter” statute.
In a recent article, “The Election-Law Connection and U.S. Federalism” [Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Summer 2013], Stanford-trained political scientist and lawyer Kirsten Nussbaumer writes that our system of relying on states to decide most questions about federal elections is unusual among federal systems. She says that because of costs and political factors, most states piggyback their elections on federal elections. She also notes that, despite constitutional authorization for the Congress to pre-empt state decisions about federal elections, it rarely does so.
