Authored by Scott Yenor via American Greatness,

The failure of the United States Senate to pass the SAVE America Act is as regrettable as it is predictable. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime in America. SAVE would have required voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. States would have to purge noncitizens from voting rolls, too.

Perhaps reliance on hostile state officials to implement the law would have rendered the SAVE America Act ineffective. We will never know.

The cause of election integrity is not dead. Congress has the constitutional power to ensure election integrity.

The American election system divides power between the states and the federal government.

States determine the “time, place, and manner” of elections and, within constitutional limits, determine who can vote.

Some states allow mail-in ballots. Others, like Oregon, send every voter a ballot. Other states allow mail-in ballots under special circumstances. Some states allow ballots to arrive well after Election Day. Some states require no identification for voters. Some wink at noncitizens voting. Others have rigorous identification requirements. Some countenance practices that sow the appearance of cheating into the counting of votes. Other states have clean elections that bring election results right away on election night.

But Congress has a plenary power to judge whether a state’s election results are consistent with the basic demands of representative government.

According to Article 1, Section 5 of the United States Constitution, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.”

Congress can ferret out fraudulent votes of all sorts—not just voting by noncitizens.

Congress can then declare elections invalid and order a new election when it judges elections to be fraudulent.

Both the Senate and the House have pre-established procedures for investigation, including the power to subpoena state officials and state voting data. This power helps Congress ensure its own integrity.

Hundreds of House elections have been challenged in American history. Often, complaints are frivolous. Sometimes complaints involve qualifications, strictly speaking. Albert Gallatin had his election to the U.S. Senate voided by a 14–12 vote in 1794 because he had not been a citizen for nine years.

Other investigations, like the McLane–Farr dispute from the 1918 election, concern corruption pure and simple. Patrick McLane was originally declared the winner in a Pennsylvania race, but once evidence of “wholesale fraud and illegality” from fictitious voters and voters who were not citizens came to light, Congress determined that John Farr won.

In the late 1990s, Loretta Sanchez defeated Congressman Bob Dornan by fewer than 1,000 votes. Dornan challenged the election. Congress found that more than 700 illegal votes were cast. Since it was not enough to sway the election, Dornan’s challenge was dropped.

Investigations into election integrity were especially common after the Civil War, when Democrat-secessionist voting practices led to severe undercounting of Republican votes in the South.

Voter intimidation compromised the entire voting environment.

Today, Republicans fear that similar broad-scale corruption plagues blue states like California, Illinois, Michigan, and Oregon, all of which seem to have weak voter identification laws, poor audit procedures, lax voter purging techniques, and a fear of federal investigations into their practices.

Are elections within these states outside the margin of fraud? To know the answer, we would have to know the margin of fraud in those states. And that requires congressional investigations.

Democrat establishments have little incentive to clean up their elections. They benefit from the fraud that keeps them in power, so they are wary of actually investigating their own elections. State election systems are not completely subject to federal oversight.

There are many reasons not to have confidence in Oregon’s elections for the national legislature, for instance. Noncitizens are welcomed and registered. Many counties have had more than 100 percent registrations among voters. Mail-in ballots are ubiquitous and automatic. Dead people or people who have moved out of state have voted in past elections, and Oregon has been particularly lax in purging its voting rolls. Oregon’s federal elections would be worth a serious look from Congress, especially federal races decided by less than 10,000 votes.

If Oregon does not want to fix its elections, it need not. The state must simply pay the penalty for porous elections by not having representation in the U.S. House or Senate.

Congress has the constitutional means and the motives to police state elections, not with new laws but with its investigatory powers.

If the rest of the country can have confidence in their elections, Congress would, no doubt, seat a delegation. Congress could deny representation to states without voter identification laws or those that wink at foreign nationals voting in their elections. Or Congress could require new elections when voting rolls are not properly purged.

Congress has the power to determine whether states have a republican form of government. States with rigged elections do not have republican governments. And Congress can dust off its own powers to ensure the integrity of the election of its own members, even without the SAVE America Act.