There’s little precedent or authorized authority for what Michigan lawmakers are searching for from the Justice Division.
By Carrie Levine for Votebeat
Earlier this month, a bunch of Republican state lawmakers in Michigan despatched a letter asking the U.S. Justice Division to “deploy official election monitors and provide comprehensive oversight for Michigan’s 2026 primary and general elections.”
Moreover election displays, which the Justice Division for years has deployed across the nation to look at elections, the letter isn’t clear on what the Republican lawmakers imply by “comprehensive oversight,” or precisely what authorized authority they consider would permit such an intervention. In interviews with Votebeat Michigan reporter Hayley Harding, two of the letter’s signatories didn’t go into specifics about what they had been envisioning; you’ll be able to learn our full report on the letter right here.
President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly pushed for extra federal oversight of elections. In March, he issued a sweeping govt order that may overhaul the way in which elections are administered in lots of states, although federal courts have since blocked a lot of its provisions on the grounds that the Structure doesn’t grant him such authority. His administration is interesting no less than a few of these choices.
In August, Trump asserted in a social media put up that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt earlier this month mentioned the administration is engaged on a second govt order on elections. Some conservative allies have instructed Trump might assert emergency powers; many specialists have mentioned he can not.
President Donald Trump, proven in 2024.
Historic precedents for such federal oversight or authority aren’t straightforward to return by. Alexander Keyssar, a professor of historical past and social coverage on the Harvard Kennedy College and the writer of “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” might solely suppose of some instances — similar to throughout Reconstruction or after the passage of the Voting Rights Act — when the federal authorities asserted authority to step in and administer an election.
Keyssar (who notes that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was as soon as his pupil) advised Votebeat there was nearly no federal involvement in elections earlier than the Civil Struggle and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Structure. They included the fifteenth Modification, which mentioned the proper of residents to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Congress handed the Enforcement Acts to guard these rights, although Keyssar in his e-book describes their passage as Congress “stretching the limits of its constitutional powers.” For just a few years, Keyssar notes, the federal authorities was actively intervening to guard the rights of Black voters within the former Accomplice states in opposition to entities such because the Ku Klux Klan.
Federal enthusiasm for such enforcement dwindled after that. Huge swaths of the Enforcement Acts had been both modified or repealed over time, and the federal authorities didn’t do far more about elections till the Civil Rights Motion, Keyssar mentioned. In 1965, Congress handed the Voting Rights Act — the subtitle of which, Keyssar factors out, is “an act to enforce the fifteenth amendment.”
Nevertheless, some elements of the Enforcement Acts are nonetheless on the books. Joseph Nunn, a counsel for the Brennan Middle’s Liberty and Nationwide Safety Program who focuses on points surrounding the home actions of the U.S. army, mentioned that features a provision of what’s at present often known as the Revolt Act.
The availability, designed for civil rights enforcement, permits the president in some circumstances to federalize the Nationwide Guard and deploy it, or the active-duty armed forces, in a state the place a bunch of persons are being disadvantaged of a constitutional proper that state authorities are both unable or unwilling to guard, he mentioned.
The availability was utilized by President Ulysses S. Grant throughout Reconstruction, Nunn mentioned, and a handful of instances through the Civil Rights Motion, together with the Little Rock, Arkansas, faculty integration disaster, however not since that interval. Nunn mentioned he believes the Revolt Act grants dangerously broad powers however wouldn’t permit a president to take over an election.
“The question would be what legal authority does the president have to unilaterally go in and seize control over an election,” he mentioned, including, “That’s not something the president can do.”
