Tidying up the remaining objections to Congress’s power over its own elections, Hamilton turns in Federalist No. 61 to a last-ditch complaint of Anti-Federalists who concede the general correctness of the arrangement. They say they want, in the Constitution, ”a declaration that all elections should be had in the counties where the electors resided.” Well, as Hamilton points out, that is something you won’t find in the typical state constitution–including that of New York, where Publius is writing. But with some people, argument gets nowhere: “To those who are disposed to consider, as innocent omissions in the state constitutions, what they regard as unpardonable blemishes in the plan of the [constitutional] convention, nothing can be said . . .”

Hamilton might also have added that, if Congress doesn’t bother to legislate on the location of elections or polling places, this whole matter will be in the hands of state legislatures. The Constitution, by its own terms, doesn’t even require the creation of distinct districts for U.S. House members within each state, and it was not until 1842 that Congress exercised any power over its own elections, deciding only in that year that distinct districts must be represented wherever a state has more than one House member.

Turning from the ridiculous to the serious, however, Hamilton notes that one advantage of Congress’s power will be to impose “uniformity in the time of elections for the federal house of representatives” (my emphasis). A fair point that, since the decisiveness of any electoral mandate for changes in policy direction can be diffused to the point of nonexistence if elections are scattered “between extremes as wide as March and November,” in Hamilton’s words. Then what happens to Congress’s responsibility to the electorate?

The fact that no exercise of Congress’s power here was undertaken before 1842 suggests (I need to look this up!) that states for the most part clustered their early congressional elections very close together, without federal regulation requiring them to do so. But the possibility of their not doing so constitutes an argument for the power of Congress to remedy the situation, as Hamilton notes.

(For explanation of this recurring feature, see here.)