Republicans in Washington are proposing sweeping changes to how elections are run in the U.S. Legislation including the SAVE America Act and the Make Elections Great Again Act are attempts to nationalize standards for how people can vote in elections.
On a recent podcast with former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, President Trump also called for nationalizing elections. During his second term, Trump has attempted to overhaul election laws via executive orders, although none have been successful so far.
But who really has power over how elections are run in the U.S.? Is nationalizing elections even legal? Derek Clinger is senior counsel for the State Democracy Initiative at UW-Madison and he joins Lake Effect’s Joy Powers to talk about this issue.
“The president doesn't really have the power to do these things on his own,” Clinger says. “The U.S. Constitution is very clear that the power to run elections rests with the states. Congress can pass legislation regulating elections, but so far they've not done anything to give the president this type of control.”
Despite legal obstacles and longstanding norms around decentralized elections, Clinger says it’s important to take Trump’s calls to nationalize elections seriously.
“With this president, he just has a reputation of kind of saying provocative and off-the-cuff remarks like this, and so I think there's a temptation to just kind of dismiss it,” he says. “But he's the president, and so you do have to take this seriously.”
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