Nationalizing Elections Is a Very Bad Idea, as It Was When Democrats Tried It

By Yuval Levin

Friday, February 06, 2026

 

When Joe Biden entered office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2021, the Democrats insisted that their first priority would be to nationalize American election administration.

 

A bill to do that, the so-called “For the People Act,” was H.R. 1 and S. 1 in the 117th Congress. In the immediate wake of a crisis of confidence in our election system created by a president who refused to accept his loss of a close election, the Democrats sought to have an exceptionally narrow Democratic majority in Washington take over key election-administration rulemaking in every state and impose new and often looser rules involving voter registration, ID requirements, eligibility, ballot harvesting, early voting, drop-boxes, mail-in voting, locations and hours of polling stations, voting by felons, campaign donations, and more. It was madness. Utter civic vandalism.

 

The problem wasn’t even that their doing this would change the results of elections. It’s unlikely that it would have. The problem was just that this would be a needless assault on public confidence in the system at a moment of already collapsing trust. But anyone pointing this out at the time was sure to be dismissed as a racist partisan hack (believe me).

 

The Democrats were persuaded that this was essential to saving American democracy. And for a time, they seemed ready to blow up the filibuster to do it — and so to nationalize elections with the backing of every Democrat in Washington and no Republicans at all.

 

Thankfully, the filibuster held, and not for the first or last time it saved us from a disastrous partisan mistake. The filibuster even helped push the two parties to work together on a constructive reform of the Electoral Count Act instead of a destructive nationalization of elections.

 

But four years later, we are looking at a kind of mirror image of that dangerous mistake. On February 2, on Dan Bongino’s podcast, President Trump was complaining about illegal-alien voting and said:

 

These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and it’s amazing the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, “We want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places.” The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.

 

Now of course, this mirror image is reflected in the carnival fun-house mirror that is the Trump presidency, and so this is a comment on a podcast and not legislation endorsed by every member of Congress from the president’s party. But it is wrong and dangerous for the same reason. And its fundamental foolishness is made all the more apparent by the fact that the other party tried to do the same thing but in the opposite direction when it was in power just four years ago. That very fact is one major reason why nationalizing elections would be a bad idea.

 

But even some critics of Trump’s move on the left don’t quite see the problem here. Richard Hasen, a law professor at UCLA and a widely respected authority on election law, had a piece in Slate the day after Trump’s comment titled “I Wrote a Book in Support of Nationalizing Elections. Trump Changed My Mind.”

 

Hasen described his earlier view in favor of nationally administered elections and then wrote:

 

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 point, American democracy is too weak and fragile to have centralized power over elections in the hands of a federal government that could be coerced or coopted by a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion.

 

This isn’t wrong. Trump does seem hell-bent on election subversion, and he has personally done more damage to public confidence in the American election system than any other individual in the history of our country.

 

But the party-line nationalization of election administration that the Democrats attempted four years ago would also have taken us down the same dangerous path. Their inability at the time to see how their partisan move would come to be used against them, and against their conception of what American democracy requires, is now mirrored in the inability of President Trump and his supporters on this front to see the same.

 

And some progressive backers of the last attempt at nationalizing the system evidently still don’t see the point: The problem isn’t just the ways in which you think the other side is dangerous. The problem is turning the infrastructure of our politics into a partisan football. The inability to see this is a function of the blinding short-termism that seems to afflict us all in this polarized age.

 

Again and again, partisans persuade themselves that this particular moment is the very hinge of history, and therefore the rules that restrain us need to be pushed aside for the sake of saving the country from imminent doom. When it manages to secure a little tiny majority for a moment, each side behaves as if this is its last chance to save the republic and therefore all the rules that make us a republic in the first place need to be abandoned. No one seems to think about what the other side will do with that precedent of abandoning the rules the next time it gets its own little tiny majority, which is likely to be very soon — since, after all, the republic is not doomed at all and we will have another election in just a couple of years in which the plainly evident asininity of the party now in power is awfully likely to get the other party elected.

 

This gets us toward the very core of the argument for substantively neutral procedural rules in a liberal society.

 

There is a philosophical path that can get us to that core: The fundamental moral premise of American public life is that all men are created equal. That we are all equal means no one has any inherent right to rule anyone else. That means our government requires our consent. But that we are all equal also means that everyone has some basic rights that no one — and no majority — can trample. So we need a system of government that empowers majorities to rule and protects minorities from oppression at the same time.

 

But there is also a much more practical path that can get us to that same core, and it begins with an appropriately long-term view of our public life. It is pretty likely that every one of us will find himself in the majority and in the minority at some point in the coming years. And that means we all should want a system that functions in a way that balances the imperative for facilitating majority rule with the imperative for securing minority rights.

 

That’s not an easy balance to sustain. It requires a complicated system with all kinds of restraints and counterweights. And that is why our system of substantively neutral procedural rules looks and works the way it does. The critics who say this system is morally vacuous are exactly wrong. It’s actually an expression of our society’s deepest moral commitments, which begin from the premise that all men and women are equally made in the image of God. And the critics who say that this system keeps us from taking the actions essential to protecting our democracy from the predations of those terrible people on the other side of the political aisle are exactly wrong too. This system keeps us from blindly marching toward self-destruction because it takes a long-term view of our political future even when we are all inclined to fall into delirious short-termism.

 

None of this means that a system of national election administration is somehow inherently wrong or unworkable. There are certainly decent arguments for it in principle, and maybe over time our political culture will slowly evolve in a direction that makes it more appropriate. But given where we are, it is absolutely not somewhere we should go — not just because the other side might use it badly, but because the rules and norms that stand in the way of our pursuing it are protecting us from our worst selves.