What I Learned Traveling Through America's Election System

Nilay Ghodasara, Class of 2027, studies Economics, Public Policy, and History. Nilay is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. 

During our nation’s 250th anniversary, it's worth remembering something our founders wrote directly into our governing documents. They directly handed the power to run and decide elections to the individual states. That design choice is part of what makes our system so strong. No central authority, not a new presidential administration or a power shift in Congress, can walk in and unilaterally rewrite how America votes. Because our elections are decentralized, they are largely immune to any one drastic change at the top.

Image

I saw that decentralization up close this year, traveling through West Virginia, Virginia, California, Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming to interview the officials who run our elections. What struck me first was how vast and varied our beautiful country is. San Francisco County, California and Albany County, Wyoming are both counties in name, but they could hardly be more different. One is home to hundreds of thousands of voters in a dense urban core, while the other to a few thousand spread across the open prairie. A rule built for an urban population, applied without adjustment to a sparse rural one, won’t work at all.

Image	Image

San Francisco County, California skyline on the left. Albany County, Wyoming prairie on the right. Source: Nilay Ghodasara

The beauty of the American system is that each state decides how it wants to run its own elections, and state legislatures pass those laws down to counties, which often have real leeway to fit them to their own communities. Weld County, Colorado, Clerk Carly Koppes put it well: Her southern precincts are full of Denver-metro commuters who need drop boxes along their routes, while her northeastern precincts have, in her words, "more cows than humans" and need something else entirely. "Somebody at the state isn't gonna know how and what's best for my county," she told me. West Virginia Secretary of State’s Chief of Staff, Donald Kersey made a similar point about policy borrowed wholesale from other states: "We have 50 different states... and they all vote differently. It's very individualized.”

I saw this play out differently in every state. West Virginia equipped all 55 county clerks with cameras to issue free photo IDs on the spot when it tightened its voter ID law in 2025. Virginia accepts a long list of IDs, including mobile student ID apps, to avoid the mass provisional-ballot problem that hit a nearby state when a university switched to phone-only IDs. California has all but eliminated the provisional ballot through same-day conditional registration; Colorado scales its vote-center and drop-box rules to county population; Nevada leans on the fact that small-county poll workers often know their voters by name; and Wyoming's clerks purge and rebuild their voter rolls by hand basically after every election. Six states, six different answers to one question: how do you make voting accessible and trustworthy in the place you serve?

Image

That question has two halves, and both matter equally. Accessibility cannot come at the cost of making sure only eligible citizens, registered in the correct jurisdiction, are casting ballots. We saw the cost of getting this wrong just last week, when New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill revealed that roughly 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote through its DMV, and around 400 had cast ballots. That wasn't a failure of accessibility, but a massive failure of basic list maintenance and state-level oversight. The states I visited take that seriously. Wyoming cross-references every registration against DMV citizenship records and the federal SAVE system; elections director Paul Raines told me his office caught four noncitizens on the rolls this way before they could vote again. California and Colorado run signature verification on every mailed ballot, tracing a voter's handwriting across years of elections. None of that makes voting harder for eligible voters; it just catches the rare cases that slip through, which is exactly what New Jersey's didn't do.

Image

It's also worth remembering that elections aren't only about the presidency. It's easy to fixate on the top of the ballot—president, governor, U.S. senator—but the races that shape daily life most directly are often closer to home: school board members, county commissioners, sheriffs, and clerks. These local offices matter just as much as the marquee ones, because they decide how schools are funded, how public safety is handled, and how local government functions day to day.

That's connected to something I noticed in nearly every interview: Americans trust local government most, trust state government somewhat less, and trust the federal government least. Douglas County, Nevada Clerk Amy Bergens explained why: "The people that are sitting in Washington, D.C., they don't know what my concerns are ... I know what my constituents want." When the people running elections are your neighbors, it's easier to trust that your vote is being counted the way you cast it.

Image

That's the case for keeping elections local. It's not about uniformity for its own sake. It's about a shared constitutional structure—one that's open enough to include every eligible voter, careful enough to exclude everyone who isn't, and flexible enough to fit fifty states and thousands of counties. That's what makes the system durable, no single hand controls it all.

Follow Duke Human Rights Center on social media and sign up for our newsletter to keep up with our Student Stories: Summer Research Series.