Does the Constitution give a blank check to the States for running elections?

[HKGuns]

Quite frankly I think the Founders would be disgusted by what they see now.

No, they'd start a revolution. An army of career bureaucrats making up "rules" is far worse than a King who could easily be poisoned or otherwise dispatched.

[SomeOtherGuy]

***The Founders assumed that Congress, like most other institutions they crafted, would be "on the up and up", i.e. not corrupted to the core. Like an actual genuinely unbiased arbiter; of course that couldn't be further from the truth nowadays.

Quite frankly I think the Founders would be disgusted by what they see now.

I agree, but I'm always a bit conflicted on how much to cite "The Founders." It is practically a form of ancestor worship among the US conservatives, especially those who are small-L libertarian and actually believe in a nation of laws, not men, as the saying goes. The Founders did a fantastic job with what they had to work with, to the extent that I can't point to any more recent constitution that I think is better or even as good, and most of them were intelligent and wise to an an extent that is basically nonexistent among current politicians, or almost any politician since Eisenhower.

But they all died roughly 200 years ago, and they truly could not anticipate how the USA's path would go. To what extent is their wisdom and view of the world more important than ours today? I think that they, themselves, created the system not based on some reverence for other people 230 years before them, but based on reason, a detailed study of history, widely varying degrees of religious inspiration (from strong to near zero), and most of all an attempt to create a system that worked immediately and for their foreseeable children and descendants. A large part of me says we should do the same today.

But for two problems. First, who is "we"? It's not limited to people like the dozen or so who might comment in this thread, it likely includes a wide range of others including craven, stupid, and people who are relatively smart and decent, but adhere to entirely alien moral systems. So I would first want to limit the scope drastically.

Second, in public conversations almost everyone proposing to discard what the Founders left for us and invent something new is scheming and leftist, usually to an extreme degree. And clinging to our ancestor worship of the Founders has helped keep a lot of their worst ideas at bay.

This all reverts back to my view that the current system isn't fixable. We can try to keep it going in tolerable form as long as possible, but understand that once it fails, something new will have to be brought in and mobs of hostile people will have to be fought off.

[Averageman]

Instead of some sort of "Jim Crow", Poll Tax; they simply bury the weight of your ballot under thousands of fake ballots.
Has the same effect, Their Boy Wins Everytime.

If you try and tell me the Democrats don't cheat on elections, I will simply point to the here and now and tell you about RFK JR trying to even debate Joe Biden.