Since September 2025, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has been litigating against states that declined to hand over a copy of their Statewide Voter Roll — the master list containing the Social Security number or driver’s license number of every registered voter. The stated purpose was narrow: verify that the people on those rolls are, in fact, qualified U.S. citizens. According to Marly Hornik, writing in American Thinker, at least 29 states have been sued over the refusal.
What happened next in court is the subject of her September 14, 2026 essay, and her conclusion is blunt. Case after case, she writes, federal judges have ruled against the United States. The pattern, in her reading, is not a series of narrow procedural losses but something closer to a constitutional inversion — one in which the principle of dual governance quietly dissolves while the “Election Administrative State” gains what she calls an anti-constitutional boost.
The Structure Hornik Says the Courts Are Ignoring
Hornik’s argument rests on a structural claim about American government that predates the familiar three branches. Before power is split among legislative, executive, and judicial departments, she notes, it is split between two sovereigns: the state and the federal government. Every citizen stands under both a state constitution and the federal one. She quotes President Monroe, writing in 1822, that “the whole power of the people, on the representative principle, is divided between them” — so that if one government betrays or usurps a right, the other can correct it.
She grounds the same idea in Federalist 51, where James Madison described the “compound republic of America” as a system in which power is first divided between two distinct governments and then subdivided again among separate departments — producing what Madison called a “double security” for the rights of the people, with each government controlling the other while also controlling itself.
Applied to elections, Hornik says, that arrangement has a specific shape: states run elections, and the federal government watches them with suspicion — because, as she puts it flatly, people cheat. Ensuring that the choice of representatives is made exclusively by legally qualified voters is, in her account, a settled role for federal law enforcement, tied to the second sentence of the U.S. Constitution.
The deeper stake, she argues, is not partisan advantage but secrecy and subversion. Elections, in her framing, are conducted on behalf of neither the states nor Congress; they secure the sovereignty of citizens over the law itself. The greatest threat to election validity is secrecy, and the greatest threat to natural rights is the subversion of Congress through voter fraud or election misconduct.
The Rulings, as Hornik Characterizes Them
Hornik’s harshest passage is reserved for the judges’ reasoning, which she summarizes in a rapid-fire list of what she treats as contradictions. In her rendering, the decisions hold that the DOJ is pursuing Trump’s secret ambition to build a single database and destroy democracy; that the word “broad” actually means “narrow”; that voter rolls are not documents requiring preservation; that voter rolls are created rather than received and therefore exempt from disclosure; that the Voting Rights Act is distinct from the federal laws later added to mandate electronic voter lists; that states must jealously guard the privacy of state citizens who are also U.S. citizens; and that the federal government lacks the qualifications to examine the Social Security numbers it issued in the first place.
Whether or not one accepts her characterization of each holding, her through-line is consistent: every ruling, in her view, protects the alleged sovereignty of the Election Administrative State rather than the liberty rights of citizens — as if, she writes, Chevron deference were not already dead.
The practical upshot, she contends, is that federal judges are telling Americans to blindly trust partisan bureaucrats running an uncontrolled election process, and to accept those bureaucrats’ word about the “choices” available for U.S. congressional representation.
The Founders, Invoked on Both Sides
Hornik notes that the advocacy group RealAmerica.Vote filed amicus briefs in the New York and Pennsylvania cases, arguing that the Founders never intended election officers to govern themselves. She cites Rufus King of Massachusetts, who warned that individual states might grow rich and powerful, become desirous of independence from the Union, and “fix on improper places, inconvenient Times, & a manner of electing wholly disagreeable to the people.”
The judges, she writes, were unmoved. Their rulings, as she describes them, held that the Elections Clause grants states absolute authority over the administration of federal elections, leaving the DOJ with no remedy.
She reaches further back for a closing precedent, invoking New York legislators who argued before the King’s Governor in 1737 that “Elections of Representatives should be free, otherwise they cannot with any Propriety of Speech be called Elections,” and who concluded that “No Government can be safe without proper Checks upon those entrusted with Power.”
It is a striking rhetorical move — colonial-era petitioners standing in for the original understanding of what an election is, and federal judges standing in for the Governor.
What Comes Next
The essay ends on a note that is part warning and part hope. Hornik writes that she hopes a U.S. Senate still exists by the time these cases reach the Supreme Court — a line that reads less as a prediction than as a statement about how far she believes the erosion has already gone.
The disputes themselves are narrow on paper: whether states must produce a voter file containing identifiers the federal government already issues, and whether the DOJ has standing to demand it. But Hornik’s argument is that the narrow framing is the point. Each ruling, taken alone, looks like a procedural question about document disclosure and standing. Taken together, in her account, they amount to a transfer of authority — away from the dual sovereignty Madison described and toward an administrative apparatus that answers, in practice, to no one the voters can reach.
Whether that reading survives contact with the Supreme Court is the open question. For now, the scoreboard Hornik describes is lopsided: dozens of states sued, and a judiciary that has, in case after case, sided with the states against the federal government’s demand to look at the rolls.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/the-self-governing-election-administrative-state/