Bob Bauer's recent essay for the NYU Democracy Project tells what seems an inescapable story of partisan manipulation of the rules of elections. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins slow-walked administrative review of a redrawn congressional map — drawn to hand Republicans an additional seat — so that a gerrymander would be in use for the state primaries. Then, an hour before the statutory deadline for subjecting the map to referendum approval, he announced the map was not subject to referendum review after all and could be used in the general election too. After conflicting state and federal court orders — and after the state Supreme Court itself called the Secretary's conduct "disingenuous" — the state Supreme Court had the final word, ordering the earlier map to be used as a matter of state law.

Bauer is careful to frame this as a problem of administration. Secretary Hoskins tried to use the discretion of his office to engineer litigation outcomes favorable to his party's map, then misrepresented that effort to reviewing courts. That is not policy disagreement. It is the machinery of election administration being bent toward a partisan result — the same pattern I described in Democracy Unmoored when Arizona's legislature stripped election-litigation authority from a Democratic secretary of state and handed it to the attorney general, but only until the next attorney general's election — an arrangement with, as I put it there, no pretense of institutional principle, just naked, short-term calculation.

Cynical observers might expect such partisan maneuvers to be the norm. The United States is close to alone among mature democracies in letting elected partisans, rather than career civil servants, run its elections. The Venice Commission — the Council of Europe's authority on democratic best practice, drawing on experience across 61 countries — treats an impartial administering body as a categorical requirement for stabilizing democracy. It calls for genuinely nonpartisan electoral commissions at every level. The American arrangement fails that standard by design. Current data compiled by the National Association of State Election Directors confirm the extent of this practice. Of the 38 states where the secretary of state is the chief election official, 31 hold that office through ordinary partisan statewide election; add Alaska and Utah, where the popularly elected lieutenant governor does the job, and 33 of the 50 states place a partisan officeholder, not a professional administrator, at the top of election administration. Only ten states plus DC and the territories vest that authority in a body answerable to a bipartisan board rather than the electorate.

Despite the temptation to cheat, US election administration, while never the platonic ideal, was generally good enough to muddle through. Although the top elected official is typically in office through partisan election, the local machinery of elections is handled on a bipartisan basis, with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans sitting on election boards. This is, in fact, the operative norm rather than a marginal feature. 42 states require polling places to be staffed by workers from opposing parties, and poll worker party affiliation is fixed by law in a substantial further number. North Carolina appoints two Democrats and two Republicans to each of its 100 county boards of elections; New Jersey requires equal party representation on every county board of elections; Wisconsin's statewide elections commission is split three Republican and three Democratic appointees, with a former clerk of each party added by the governor; Arizona requires equal numbers of poll inspectors from the two largest parties and pairs each precinct inspector with a marshal from the opposing party. Missouri itself, the state at the center of the present controversy, requires its own local election judges to work in bipartisan pairs, one Democrat and one Republican, at every polling place. The design assumption running through all of it is the same one that failed at the top of Missouri's hierarchy: no single party is trusted to run an election alone.

American elections, except at the top of the administrative pyramid, were policed by mutual surveillance. So long as each party could watch the other, a shared stake in electoral competition, the discipline of repeat play, and an ordinary sense that today's tactics will be available to one's opponents tomorrow kept the temptation to cheat in reasonable check. Michigan in 2020 is the clearest demonstration: 1,603 county and local officials, operating through decades of bureaucratic routine and bipartisan custom, produced reliable results even when two Republican Wayne County canvassers briefly balked at certification under direct pressure from the White House — and then reversed themselves. The system held, but only barely, and the stability traced to Michigan's long-haul bipartisan commitment.

Fair election administration reflects the dependence of stable democratic governance on the internalization of politics as repeat play — on losers today believing they can be winners tomorrow, and on officeholders discounting the future enough to protect norms they will need invoked on their own behalf later. Even though the top officials are partisans, they acted within the constraints of long-established political parties. Unfortunately, we live in an era of populist immediacy in which claims of existential stakes in elections make commitments to long-term shared interests seem naïve. As seen in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, and Mexico's assaults on independent election commissions, the pressure is to treat each election as a plebiscite settling everything now and presumably forever, rather than one round in an indefinitely continuing game. Where American election officials lacked formal Weberian insulation — no civil-service protection, no removal-for-cause guarantee — what substituted for it was a shared bipartisan environment that made unilateral retaliation costly. Strip out the expectation of reciprocity, and the frailty of the system is revealed.

In Missouri, the Secretary of State needed only to stop discounting the future the way durable self-governance requires. When an official calculates that the electoral base will reward brazenness regardless of how courts eventually rule, that national partisan networks will shield him from cross-party accountability rather than let it bite. The informal check bipartisan administration relies on simply stops functioning. The formal statute does not change; the behavioral assumption underneath it does.

Our current fears over the system breaking down owe much to the ultimate guardians of election integrity being themselves vulnerable. At the local level, Democrats and Republicans were never in agreement on which candidate should win. But they shared the long view of the need for process integrity. In Michigan in 2020, and then again in Missouri this year, that got tossed aside in favor of a particular outcome, demanding that all caution be tossed aside in favor of a power grab. Perhaps because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem capable of restraint, we look to the courts to chasten the pursuit of immediate self-interest. That has never been the legal tradition in which matters of election administration were given wide deferential berth by reviewing courts.

Courts can punish contempt after the fact; they cannot restore years of mutual restraint that let bipartisan election administration function without constant judicial policing. Trust of that kind, once broken, does not readily go back into the tube. If a durable share of American election officials now discounts the future the way Hoskins evidently did, the two-thirds of states that hand election administration to partisan officeholders are relying on a backstop that may no longer exist. Reciprocal restraint among rivals is premised on the notion that rivals expect to trade places in the next election. That mutual obligation is hard to codify and may be yielding to much cruder zero-sum populist politics.