ABSTRACT
THE LEGAL CONTEXT in which campaigns and elections take place in the United States is a complex web of rules and regulations established at the local, state, and national levels. As the National Commission on Federal Election Reform’s Task Force on Constitutional and Federal Election Law put it, “The American electoral system falls at the intersection of many different regulatory regimes-some federal, some state; some constitutional, some statutory; some general, some specific; and some mandatory and some prohibitory.” Though election regulations may be enacted at various levels of government, there is an accepted “hierarchy of authority,” namely, “federal constitutional law trumps federal statutory law, which trumps state constitutional law, which in turn trumps state statutory law, not to mention state administrative regulation.”1 Nevertheless, the administration of elections is the responsibility of local authorities.2 By one estimate, there are roughly 13,000 electoral jurisdictions in the United States.3
