goal is to move up the ladder of culpability to candidates, political operatives, public officials, and others who attempted to corrupt, or did corrupt, the public office involved. Federal jurisdiction over election fraud is easily established in elections when a federal candidate is on the ballot. The mere listing of a federal candidate’s name on a ballot is sufficient, under most of the federal statutes used to prosecute voter fraud, to establish federal jurisdiction. This generally occurs in what are called “mixed” elections, when federal and non-federal candidates are running simultaneously. In such cases, the federal interest is based on the presence of a federal candidate, whose election may be tainted, or appear tainted, by the fraud, a potential effect that Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate under Article I, Section 2, clause 1; Article I, Section 4, clause 1; Article II, Section 1, clause 2; and the Seventeenth Amendment. The absence of a federal candidate from the ballot can present federal law enforcement with special challenges in attaining federal jurisdiction over election crime. Those challenges can sometimes be met, provided the investigation focuses on identifying additional facts that are needed to invoke application of the federal criminal laws that potentially apply to both federal and non-federal elections. These generally include election frauds that involve the necessary participation of public officers, notably election officials acting “under color of law,” voting by non-citizens, fraudulently registering voters, or paying voters in violation of state law. Federal jurisdiction over campaign financing offenses under FECA also derives from Congress’s authority to regulate the federal election process. While a number of the provisions added to FECA by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) address financial activities by state and local parties that are generic in the sense that they simultaneously benefit both federal 6