A Comparative Study of the Powers of the Election Commission in India and The United States of America

A Comparative Study of the Powers of the Election Commission in India and The United States of America Ashok Kumar This article undertakes a comparative examination of the institutional powers vested in the Election Commission of India and the corresponding, far more fragmented apparatus of election administration in the United States. India concentrates the entire electoral process, the preparation of electoral rolls, the conduct of every election to Parliament and the State Legislatures, and elections to the offices of President and Vice-President in a single constitutional body under Article 324, whose authority the Supreme Court has repeatedly characterised as plenary in Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner and its progeny. The United States, by contrast, assigns primary responsibility for election administration to the states under the Elections Clause of Article I, reserving to the federal government only narrowly bounded statutory agencies: the Federal Election Commission, confined to campaign-finance disclosure and enforcement, and the Election Assistance Commission, limited to voluntary technical standards. Drawing on this foundational asymmetry, the article compares the two systems’ institutional composition and security of tenure, their substantive powers over voting technology and electoral rolls, and the divergent trajectories of judicial review, from Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India and the ongoing challenge to the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023, to Shelby County v. Holder, Bush v. Gore, and Moore v. Harper. It further examines two live controversies as case studies in institutional vulnerability: the contested 2023 reconstitution of India’s Election Commissioner selection committee, and the 2025–2026 litigation surrounding President Trump’s executive orders on election administration, in which federal courts have held that authority over election regulation rests with the states and Congress rather than the executive. The article concludes that India’s concentrated model and America’s fragmented model each guard against a different failure mode — captured authority versus uncoordinated authority — and that each system’s current controversies expose precisely the vulnerability its own design was least equipped to anticipate.