Primary authority is with local governments, but the legal framework imposes some obligations on these officials. While state governments are a common focal point for electoral management, their effective control is often weak. American University’s Robert Pastor called the system “decentralized to the point of being dysfunctional.”

Responsibility for electoral management and core funding, from registration to results, is shared between 50 state and 13,000 local governments. The EMB model is governmental or mixed, meaning either appointed or elected officials or multi-partisan commissions manage the process. 

At the state level, responsibility for oversight and confirmation of results is with an elected or appointed, partisan Secretary of State, who is a member of the state executive. Less frequently these duties are with boards of elections. Because most states’ chief electoral officers are often elected officials, it is not uncommon for him or her to publically campaign while overseeing an election.

Nationally, the Federal Electoral Commission regulates political finance disclosure and, when candidates accept it, public funding. Following controversies over voting equipment in the 2000 federal election, an Electoral Assistance Commission now establishes equipment standards and best management practices, but it cannot formally enforce them.

While EMBs are not structurally independent, they generally work impartially with relatively infrequent exceptions in the modern era. Nonetheless, mistakes and malfeasance, whether actual or perceived, have called elections’ legitimacy into question. Indeed, 27 percent of Americans polled in the 2004 post-election period believed the presidential voting process was unfair.

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