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Given the ongoing fallout from the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and the fast-approaching 2024 election, lawmakers are scrambling to prevent another president from trying to manipulate Congress’s certification process to overturn election results.
The push for this legislation comes as Republican candidates across the country continue to question the 2020 election results and make their position on it central to their midterm campaigns. Senators co-sponsoring the bill have emphasized the importance of passing these changes ahead of the next presidential election, when Trump or another candidate may try to mobilize supporters to target Congress again.
. . .The first section is the Electoral Count Reform Act, which would do the following:
- Specify that the vice president’s role is purely ceremonial: Although Pence refused to follow Trump’s plan, the bill would ensure that no future vice president would have any leeway to try to execute a similar proposal. It clarifies that the vice president “does not have any power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate disputes over electors.”
- Increase the number of lawmakers required to register objections to a state’s results: Currently, just one senator and one representative need to file an objection for it to receive a vote in both chambers. The legislation would increase this threshold to one-fifth of members in both the House and the Senate, respectively. This is intended to ensure that any objections are backed by a broader swath of lawmakers.
- Designate the governor as the only person who can submit a state’s electors: To prevent states from trying to submit competing slates of electors, the legislation notes the governor of a state is the only person able to designate the final results sent to Congress. This is intended to address a scenario in which different government officials try to push different slates: if a state’s secretary of state attempted to submit a different outcome than the governor, for example. In 2020, some Republican leaders in different states sought to offer up alternate slates of electors that declared Trump the winner.
- Clarifies law to ensure that state lawmakers can’t overturn a state’s popular vote: Because of how ambiguous the language is in the current law, Trump had previously argued that it gives state legislatures the room to override a state’s popular vote if they supported a different candidate.
For more: Electoral Count Act of 1887:
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) (Pub.L. 49–90, 24 Stat. 373,[1] later codified at Title 3, Chapter 1[2]) is a United States federal law adding to procedures set out in the Constitution of the United States for the counting of electoral votes following a presidential election. The Act was enacted by Congress in 1887, ten years after the disputed 1876 presidential election, in which several states submitted competing slates of electors and a divided Congress was unable to resolve the deadlock for weeks.[3] Close elections in 1880 and 1884 followed, and again raised the possibility that with no formally established counting procedure in place, partisans in Congress might use the counting process to force a desired result.
- Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.
