, Columnist
How Vote-Counting Became a Job for the States
The Constitution’s framers took pains to keep power over national elections out of presidential hands.
Not Washington’s job.
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The current confusion and anxiety surrounding presidential vote-counting, with different states using different rules and procedures, make it natural to wonder: Wouldn’t it have been better to let the federal government oversee the process?
The framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t think so, for reasons of principle. Some of the foundations of their thinking can be found in the Federalist Papers, written mostly by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (with a few by John Jay), among the greatest works in all of political science and the most important contemporaneous explanation of the framers’ thinking.