Hillary’s Unlawful Plan to Overrule Voter-ID Laws

Automatic registration at 18, letting felons vote—it’s all part of an unconstitutional progressive dream.

Declaring that Republican-controlled states have “systematically and deliberately” tried to “disempower and disenfranchise” voters, Hillary Clinton has called for a sweeping expansion of federal involvement in elections. In a speech last week in Houston, laying out what promises to be a major campaign theme, Mrs. Clinton called for automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early-voting period and a maximum 30-minute wait period to vote.

She has also endorsed the idea of a federal law permitting convicted felons to vote and allowing individuals, such as students, who reside in one state to vote in another. All of these federal mandates would augment and make more onerous an unconstitutional election-regulating federal statute known as the “Motor Voter” law enacted during her husband’s White House tenure.

A federal takeover of election laws—and rolling back state voter-ID laws intended to discourage election fraud—is a high priority for progressives. The billionaire financier George Soros reportedly has pledged $5 million to bankroll legal challenges to laws like those that Mrs. Clinton decries. Part of the effort is intended simply to galvanize the Democratic base by stoking a sense of grievance, but the strategy should be taken seriously—and rebutted as unconstitutional.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections, not state ones. It also distinguishes between the regulation of presidential versus congressional elections. Specifically, under Article I, Section 4—the Elections Clause—while the states have primary responsibility for regulating congressional elections, Congress can pre-empt their rules by regulating “times, places and manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” except that Congress cannot regulate the “places of chusing [sic] Senators.”

For presidential elections, the Constitution restricts Congress’s power and grants states an even more robust role—which is why the president is elected by the votes of the state-driven Electoral College, rather than directly by the people. Accordingly, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution permits congressional regulation only of “the time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes.”

With this constitutional backdrop, Mrs. Clinton’s proposals as applied to presidential elections would be entirely unconstitutional. They go well beyond regulating the time of choosing the electors for the Electoral College and the date for voting.

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