US election - technicalities
When I'm posting this, it looks pretty clear that Trump has won. On this thread, I'm not looking at the whys and wherefores of his victory, but some of the technicalities present in any US Presidential election.
The first is that there's not one election, but rather that there are 50 or more separate elections, with each State setting its own rules for counting, maintenance of rolls, general polling booth rules and so forth. I can understand that for purely State elections, but would have expected that for Federal elections the rules would have been uniform in each State and Territory.
Have I misread the position? If I'm right is there any suggestion that there be uniformity?
The first is that there's not one election, but rather that there are 50 or more separate elections, with each State setting its own rules for counting, maintenance of rolls, general polling booth rules and so forth. I can understand that for purely State elections, but would have expected that for Federal elections the rules would have been uniform in each State and Territory.
Have I misread the position? If I'm right is there any suggestion that there be uniformity?
Comments
In many places, boards of elections are led by nonpartisan public servants devoted to the integrity of the vote. But in others, people who believe in voting fraud conspiracies or who reject the results of the 2020 election have worked their way into these positions (or, if not in the local board of elections, into the state board of elections or into local government positions that are supposed to certify the results of an election similar to the way that a monarch gives royal assent but that now are threatening to not certify an election unless they think it was "done fairly"). If the results of this year's election had been different, there might have been some chaos not just from citizen conspiracy theorists protesting/threatening the counting of the vote, but by local officials themselves. The courts would have been still likely to make sure that elections results are honored anyway, but not soon enough to prevent sowing doubt and delaying the result enough to prevent the electoral college from functioning and Congress from certifying the results.
Try Google.
You're mostly correct. There are some rules of uniformity. States can't racially discriminate on their voting rolls (Fifteenth Amendment). They can't restrict voting by gender (Nineteenth Amendment). They can't impose poll taxes* (Twenty-Fourth Amendment). They can't have a minimum voting age higher than 18 years old (Twenty-Sixth Amendment). The boundaries of federal House districts and state legislative districts have to be drawn in such a way that they contain roughly equal population (Wesbury v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims). Article I, § 4, cl. 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives the federal Congress the power to over-ride state election regulations, stating:
To the best of my knowledge aside from various laws enforcing the aforementioned Constitutional limitations Congress has only used this power to make a uniform date for federal elections (the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November) and to require states to offer voter registration to any eligible citizens who apply for or renews a driver's license (the Motor Voter Act). There may be other federal regulations I'm not aware of. It's not my field of expertise.
*Cross-Pond translation: In the U.S. a poll tax is a tax or other financial payment required to cast a ballot, unlike in the U.K. where the term usually refers to per capita taxation.