Many Americans are afraid of what the aftermath of the election could bring. Alongside familiar concerns about the country’s priorities, reflected in the candidates’ differing policy prescriptions, they worry that one of the candidates may refuse to accept the results as legitimate. With the memory of the violent January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol still fresh, many voters fear that the peaceful transfer of power will again be under attack. Heightening these concerns is the likelihood that the election will be decided by a comparatively tiny number of votes in a few swing states—raising the possibility that state-level challenges could throw the integrity of the election into doubt.

Indeed, since 2020, the crucial role of the states in presidential elections has become a point of intense scrutiny. In one sense this is understandable: with its 50 different states, each with its own election rules and overseen by its own election officials, the U.S. electoral system is unlike that of nearly all other democracies; even most federations have centralized election commissions that set electoral rules for provinces to administer. Some have argued that this variation and decentralization could, in the event of another contested result, pose a danger to American democracy itself: indeed, many may fear that a single, partisan-controlled state could potentially try to thwart the election outcome. These anxieties have led to calls to centralize the rules, processes, and even the administration of elections.

But this view ignores the vital ways that states can also safeguard American democracy—including in a contested presidential election. The U.S. Constitution grants states wide latitude over areas of law and administration not explicitly accorded to the federal government: as of 2023, state and local jurisdictions had a total of 19 million employees relative to the federal government’s three million civilian employees; they also command the vast bulk of the country’s law enforcement resources, organize and oversee all elections, and retain the investigative and prosecutorial capacity to clear up election-related concerns. These prerogatives are a core feature of the United States, and because the states must coexist with a large federal government with formidable powers of its own, conflict over state authority has long been a major theme in U.S. history.

But precisely because of state powers, it is actually much harder for any candidate or party to steal a presidential election. Even if the outcome hinges on a single jurisdiction, those seeking to overturn the result would need to muster support from a variety of state and local governments, and these, in turn, could use their power to mount strenuous resistance to such efforts. In addition to simply upholding an independent election process, states could, in extreme circumstances, take further steps to obstruct a partisan effort to interfere with the election process, for example, by filing lawsuits, suspending cooperation with the federal government, or mobilizing local constituencies to oppose efforts to thwart democracy.

This does not mean that efforts to delegitimize the results of the election—or the possibility that antidemocratic forces may try to mount a sustained attack on the electoral system—should be taken lightly. As voters learned in early January of 2021, even when state public officials resist a partisan call to reverse election outcomes, a further vulnerability comes at the point of aggregation: in Congress, where the electoral votes are counted. But it does suggest that there are multiple ways that states can uphold democratic institutions, even in moments of extreme stress. As a crucial feature of U.S. democracy, this latent capacity could help constrain reckless attempts to undermine the mechanics of the election and the peaceful transfer of power.

TAKING ON TYRANNY

Along with other powers granted to them, the states’ authority to hold and oversee elections did not come about by chance. It goes back to the origins of U.S. federalism in the eighteenth century. In The Federalist Papers, no. 45, James Madison wrote that “the powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” As Madison saw it, the federal government’s primary role was limited to national security, conducting trade with foreign entities, and ensuring the free movement of goods and people between the states. The states, as the original political units on which the republic was built, retained control of the elections. More than two centuries later, this account of the state-federal balance continues to remain broadly true.

For the founders, allowing states to maintain a preponderance of power provided a “double security” against tyranny; if fragmentation of the national government was insufficient to prevent a tyrant, the resistance from the states would both enfeeble the would-be tyrant and, by sounding a cry of alarm, cause the public to turn away from the despot. The states’ capacity to govern also provided an important spur to policy experimentation and innovation, allowing them to try out measures that could, if successful, be adapted at the federal level. In recent years, as gridlock in Congress has often slowed federal policymaking and the U.S. Supreme Court continues to rein in the power of the executive branch, states have become even more important policy actors. All of which helps explain why federalism continues to be a core feature of American democracy and how states can safeguard the democratic process.

Nonetheless, since 2020, state control of elections has begun to seem more of a vulnerability. Following that election, Trump and his allies attempted to pressure states such as Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan not to certify their state election results. Although the states did not cave to this pressure and none of the challenges succeeded, the turmoil caused some observers to argue that control of elections needs to be centralized. Indeed, many citizens now harbor doubts about the competence of state officials to uphold democracy.

In particular, the diverse ways that states choose to administer elections have become a central focus of those who seek to question the legitimacy of electoral processes. At a time of heightened anxiety about American democracy in general, states’ broad authority to hold elections according to their own rules—including deciding ballot design, polling locations and hours, and the criteria that candidates have to meet to appear on the ballot and voters to vote—has contributed to public uncertainty and politically motivated attacks. In a system that relies on local administration, so the argument goes, any local official might fall prey to the corrupting temptation of money or power—or, as Madison feared, to the allure of a would-be despot. Conditioned by partisan commentary to anticipate such corruption, many voters may come to distrust the official vote count, suspecting fraud in the voting rolls, including voting by noncitizens or even by the deceased.

Yet centralized control of elections, policies, and government capacity could introduce its own vulnerabilities. Although it might in principle seem efficient, giving a federal election agency authority over the election process, for example, would mean that those seeking to undermine voting outcomes would need to capture only a single authority. Even short of an actual coup, such a system would also be more vulnerable to election hacking, since a concentrated attack might have nationwide consequences.

In fact, the existing system offers a number of important democratic protections. For one, state control ensures that the United States’ presidential election is a complex, multitiered, and multimonth process—encompassing voting, counting, and certification—the bulk of which falls to state officials. This process was further clarified by the 2022 amendments to the Electoral Count Act, which redefined the certification of electoral votes and affirmed the vice president’s role as purely ceremonial. For another, the sheer number of disparate state and local jurisdictions that would need to be manipulated makes any attempt to steal an election much harder.

It is also essential to remember the resilience demonstrated by state election officials in 2020. Despite intense pressures, such as the Trump administration’s attempts to influence the Republican members of Michigan’s Board of Canvassers not to certify the state’s vote count, no state officials altered the election’s outcome. Rigorous review processes failed to uncover any significant instances of voter fraud, and the integrity of the counting and certification was maintained by public officials across the board. As U.S. Election Commissioner Ben Hovland described it to one of us, after visiting countless election sites across the country, he and his fellow commissioners are struck by the integrity of local officials; even those who are partisan-elected overwhelmingly put country above party.

These state and local officials are democracy’s backbone. Even so, in light of preparations that have already been made in some quarters to challenge the outcome of the current election, it is fair to ask whether these officials would be enough to withstand a more concerted antidemocratic attack.

THE ROGUE STATE RISK

When rioters assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote, they introduced the shocking prospect that the outcome of a U.S. election might be thwarted by political violence. But they also raised the specter of another kind of threat to American democracy: what if the federal system becomes so splintered that it causes a state to throw an election to a preferred candidate—as supporters of the insurrection hoped? Traditionally, state party officials, bound by democratic norms, would honor the electoral outcome, and they ultimately did in late 2020 and early January 2021. But the insurrection put the American public on high alert. Although the system held that time, it should not depend on the heroism of local and state election officials who put democracy above party.

What might another extreme attack on the U.S. electoral system look like? Because of the decentralized electoral system, an individual state does have the power to delay or subvert the process of appointing electors—perhaps by alleging voting irregularities—even in the event of a clear popular-vote victory for a certain candidate in that state. In Moore v. Harper (2023), the U.S. Supreme Court underscored the continuing relevance of existing state law governing the allocation of electoral votes—procedures that presumably can be changed only by following the rules laid out in state constitutions. Nonetheless, it is possible that committed partisans in a given state could find a way to frustrate the appointment of duly elected slates of electors from that state. In the event that such a reckless effort were poised to reverse the outcome of the presidential race, the resulting crisis could spur the remaining states to take extraordinary measures to protect the democratic order.

In a 2022 essay in Foreign Affairs, we argued that federalism is a balancing act, in which national and state powers are counterposed. No single government—whether the national executive or any state government—can exert control over the whole electoral process. That implies that just as federalism guards against the tyranny made possible through overt centralization, federalism also has counterweights to prevent individual state governments from wrecking the whole. Although the Constitution empowers states to run elections, it also allows for congressional intervention. One example is the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and particularly, the preclearance requirement it included for jurisdictions with racist pasts. The Help America Vote Act of 2002, passed with bipartisan support following the problematic 2000 presidential election, created new national standards for election administration, including upgraded voting equipment and voting systems, provisional voting procedures, and the creation and maintenance of statewide voter-registration databases.

Indeed, Congress had already exerted its authority in the Electoral Count Act in 1887, which institutionalized standards to reduce the extent of reliance on democratic norms. For the first time, the United States had relatively precise rules and deadlines governing each state’s determination of its slate of electors. The act was designed to counter the problems of the 1876 election, when some states submitted competing slates; that election required a compromise to settle on a winner, and the cost was undoing many of the Reconstruction Acts. 

In 2022, the Electoral Count Reform Act, passed with bipartisan support, strengthened the original act by creating a system of judicial oversight, where courts have the final say on the lawful counting of votes and determination of a slate of electors. These rulings are binding on Congress, insulating members of Congress from the potential influence of machinating governors, who might otherwise seek to pressure their state’s representatives to lodge unfounded objections during the electoral-vote-counting process in Congress. And states cannot change the rules of how votes will be counted after the election has begun.

STATES OF EMERGENCY

But the capacity to prevent a rogue state from thwarting the U.S. election process goes beyond Congress. As the 2020 election demonstrated, federalism can also bolster the integrity of elections precisely because of the power that states themselves have. In an extreme case, a fatally flawed federal election or tendentious effort to disqualify legitimately elected senators or representatives could trigger a strong enough backlash from remaining states—involving litigation and lack of cooperation with the federal government—to make governing more costly for those who would seek to wrest control of the government.

Consider the unlikely but possible event that a candidate or party attempts to subvert the legitimate outcome of an election by taking advantage of any remaining loopholes in the counting of electoral votes. For example, the Speaker of the House might try to argue, without support from any court, that recently enacted reforms to the electoral-vote-counting process still leave the Speaker some room to decide whether the election was “free and fair”; or the Speaker might hold that those reforms are unconstitutional and that a different process should be followed to determine whether votes from certain slates of electors from key states should be counted. Suppose further that such a maneuver managed to cast doubt on enough electoral votes for the election to be decided by the House of Representatives.

In this extreme case, states could conceivably respond by leveraging their own governing capacity—by opting out of or slowing cooperative federalism arrangements, for example, or by bringing reasonable lawsuits against the federal government—to raise concerns about the specific democracy-related question at issue. This does not mean that states would be unconstrained in their use of such powers: state and federal courts might well hear certain disputes about the balance of state and federal power and the purposes for which state power can be used, for example. Lawyers and scholars would pass judgment, and cross-partisan pro-democracy coalitions would need to emerge to support and legitimize the states’ contentious actions.

In practice, of course, the dynamics of a state’s role in the federal system depends on who is in charge of what office or branch. It is much more difficult, if not impossible, to reverse an election outcome if the would-be insurrectionists lack allies in the state leadership. In the upcoming election, five battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—have Democratic governors, for example, even though Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature in Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and the upper house in Pennsylvania. In cases of divided government, the legislature and executive oversee one another, raising a public alarm at any sign of malfeasance. And since they are battlegrounds, all these states also have a relatively split public—one that would most likely generate an outcry if either party seeks to pervert the electoral process.

The larger reality is that the democratic guardrails on which the U.S. election system depends—a system whose health and stability have global implications—remain crucially with the states: not with Congress, and not with local election boards.

SAFER, NOT FAILSAFE

Despite deep institutional commitments to democracy and the rule of law in the United States, the last decade has provided ample evidence that institutions can be directly threatened. And they may be especially vulnerable during the high stakes of the presidential election process. It should also be noted that in recent presidential contests, objections to the certification of the electoral vote have come from members of both major parties, with several Democratic members of Congress raising opposition after the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections. Federalism is not a panacea, but it does offer a measure of protection against antidemocratic forces that seek to pervert the will of the people. The genuinely federated system that Americans often take for granted makes it far harder to steal an election from the top by providing counterweights to potential rogue states and by creating an environment in which state-level experimentation can lead to broader practices that better serve the public.

Of course, state authority can also work against public confidence in elections. The proliferation of partisan gerrymandering in many states, for example, and the range of electoral procedures between states and even from one county to another, can lead voters to mistrust the system. The wide diversity in the way that individual states design and run their elections may also raise doubts, particularly in an era of intense polarization. Certain states, for example, may offer no-excuse absentee ballots or same-day registration where others do not; some may offer much more expansive early voting than others, and some may permanently disenfranchise citizens convicted of felonies where others do not. When faced with this variation, it is natural that many Americans would interpret it in terms of inequity and injustice.

But every element of this state-level variation is consequential and also has the potential, as with other areas of policy, to bring innovation to the system. For example, some states have addressed partisan gerrymandering by appointing nonpartisan or balanced citizen or judicial panels to draw political boundaries. In the backdrop of widespread dissatisfaction with the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College, Nebraska and Maine allocate their electoral votes at the more fine-grained district level. Other experiments are less noticeable but nonetheless consequential: by increasing early voting, for example, states have observed changes in who participates in elections, including those previously left out of the process. In a recent study, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab found that from 2010 to 2022, almost every state improved its management of elections among 18 indicators, from percentage of mail ballots rejected to voter turnout. The only one that did not improve was North Dakota, which already was ranked highest among the states.

The United States faces strong headwinds from cultural conflict, as well as deliberate efforts by domestic and foreign actors to sow divisions, spread disinformation, and create distrust in the system. If federalism is unable to prevent policy paralysis in Congress or eliminate the risk of political violence, it can at least fill the policymaking vacuum through advances at the state level. And crucially, it can also provide a defense against a sudden slide toward tyranny. Ultimately, a federal system that endows states with substantial authority can act as a powerful custodian of democracy, one that goes well beyond the mere involvement of state officials in the electoral system. For those who fear a frayed electoral process, or a leader who could pose serious threats to the future of American democracy, the independence of states will be pivotal in keeping the country resilient.