Despite high turnout, the 2020 election is already proving to be a mess — buried in litigation, and plagued by disinformation that spreads through toxic partisanship.
Though the pandemic and this erratic president are stress-testing our election system like never before in recent memory, the challenges of holding a free and fair vote in America have been mounting for decades. Since the early 2000s, court battles over election rules have become constant, while global experts like those with The Economist’s “Democracy Index” have downgraded the quality of American democracy across multiple measures for years.
No matter who ends up prevailing, it is clear that Congress needs to establish a federal elections agency to ensure that the voting process is fair, consistent, secure and legitimate — from redistricting to registration to voting technology. Would this be constitutional? In short, absolutely: Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives Congress broad powers to “make or alter” regulations affecting elections.
Current federal regulators — the Election Assistance Commission, which disperses funding to states and makes administration and security recommendations, and the Federal Election Commission, which oversees campaign finance laws — are woefully insufficient.
