Thad Hall and Dan Tokaji have written this Moritz commentary. It begins:

Federal elections are the country’s oldest unfunded mandate. The Constitution gives Congress power to make or alter rules for federal elections, but the task of running those elections has long been left to state and local governments. To this day, state and local governments still bear the costs of running federal elections, while being required to follow complicated rules laid down by the federal government. This division of labor has unfortunate consequences for both sides. State and local election officials lack the resources they need to administer elections optimally. At the same time, it is often difficult to tell where the most serious electoral problems lie, or even whether federal laws are being followed, due to the notoriously poor quality of information on how elections are actually being run.
We propose a significant alteration to this longstanding state of affairs. The federal government should provide an ongoing stream of money to state and local governments for the conduct of federal elections. In exchange, state and local election officials would have to provide comprehensive and reliable data to the federal government on such matters as registration, turnout, voting equipment, absentee voting, provisional ballots, and disability access. Those that provide incomplete or inaccurate information would lose their federal funding. This would make it much easier to evaluate the results of federal election reform and to diagnose problems before they result in post-election meltdowns like the one Florida experienced in 2000, or near-misses like the one Ohio saw in 2004.