Federalism

Trump's call to "nationalize elections" leads prominent election law scholar Rick Hasen to reverse his longstanding support for such a policy.

Ilya Somin | 2.8.2026 3:48 PM

Donald Trump's recent calls for Republicans to "national elections" have led UCLA law Prof. Rick Hasen - one of the nations leading election law scholars - to reconsider his longstanding support for such nationalization. In an insightful recent article in Slate, Hasen explains the reasons for this change of heart:

If you look around the world at advanced democracies from Australia to Canada, they have an independent governmental body in charge [of] all national elections. The body imposes uniform standards for registration, ballot access, voting machinery, and much more….

In The Voting Wars [a 2012 book], I argued that by joining other advanced democracies we could decrease the amount of partisan fighting and litigation over election rules, increase the competence of election administration, and assure we have a system run with integrity and fair access to voting….

Donald Trump has caused me to abandon this argument. As I wrote in the New York Times last summer, when the president tried to impose his authority over various aspects of American elections via an executive order: "What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles." At this........

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