Editorial written by Las Vegas Review-Journal Editorial Board
Five years after Democrats pushed to nationalize election law, they’re up in arms that Republican President Donald Trump is talking about nationalizing election law. Go figure.
Last week, Trump caused quite a stir — he has that gift, after all — with his comments on a podcast about the November midterm elections. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 states,” the president said. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
His spokesman later said that Trump was simply expressing support for the Safeguard American Vote Eligibility Act, pending legislation that would, among other things, create a national voter ID requirement and demand that those registering to vote show proof of citizenship. The president had previously taken steps in this regard through a controversial executive order issued in March, promoting citizenship verification and the more timely return of mail ballots.
But many critics were apoplectic about Trump’s latest comments. “Any attempt by the federal government to take over Nevada’s elections,” huffed Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, “should be viewed as an attempt to take away Nevada’s constitutional right to vote. It will not happen on my watch.”
Notably, Ford and most members of his party sang a different tune in 2021 when congressional Democrats proposed a federal takeover of the election process in the name of combating phantom voter “suppression.” Their legislation, HR1, would have forced states to offer same-day registration and allow mail ballots to be returned well after election day. It would also have created public funding for elections, overturned state voter ID laws, and made ballot harvesting legal across the country.
Democrats aren’t against “nationalizing” elections as long as they’re the ones doing the nationalizing. In fact, however, polls show that Americans are far more likely to support Republican initiatives such as voter ID than Democratic efforts to increase turnout at the expense of election security. Nevadans, for instance, easily approved the first step toward amending the state constitution to require proof of identification at the polls. It’s doubtful that ballot harvesting enjoys similar public support.
The problem with “nationalizing” elections — no matter which party proposes it — is that the Constitution gives states wide leeway to set “the times, places and manner of holding elections,” while giving Congress the power “to alter such regulations.” Absent a compelling reason to step in, Congress should exert a more subtle hand and generally defer to the states on these matters. Anything more than that — whether promoted by Trump in 2026 or Nancy Pelosi in 2021 — isn’t likely to withstand judicial scrutiny.
