A day after the House recommended that the Justice Department prosecute former President Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, a group of senators said they would pass reforms to make it harder to do the same thing again.
Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., said an update to the Electoral Count Act of 1886 would be included in an end-of-year spending bill. A group of 39 senators co-sponsored it.
This is a monumental achievement to reduce the risk of a stolen presidential election through political manipulation of the electoral count. Matthew Seligman, an expert in election law, thanked God.
Trump said during the campaign that he might not accept the result if he lost. The current ECA, which was passed in response to the disputed 1876 election, gives too much room for bad actors to misinterpret its language in an effort to throw out legitimate elections.
The assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump's supporters occurred four years after he lost the presidential election. Congress was supposed to certify the election results. It was the first time in the nation's history that that step was delayed.
It took several months for a consensus to form around the need to strengthen and clarify the ECA after a federal judge called a coup in search of a legal theory. Manchin and Collins started working on ECA reform in January.
A 35-page report was released by the House Administration Committee. The 87-page report that Seligman published outlined in great detail the ways that the ECA was vulnerable to abuse.
Trump tried to get his vice president to reject the election results and throw out the votes of millions of Americans. I didn't have the right to change the outcome of the election. In February of this year, the vice president said that the presidency belonged to the Americans.
The witnesses who testified before the committee said that Trump wanted Congress to approve a slate of fake electors that did not represent the votes in several states. They wanted to get Trump into the presidency against the will of the majority of Americans.
The law didn't allow this. Several lawyers inside the White House testified in front of the Jan. 6 committee that they were told by Eastman that this was true.
The 1887 legislation that was vague enough for lawyers to try to exploit was shut down by the ECA reform bill. According to testimony before the committee, Eastman admitted that the Supreme Court wouldn't accept his legal theories that Trump was using as a pretext to pressure Pence.
According to a statement provided to the committee by a former federal Judge, the machinations of Eastman were the most reckless, calamitous failures in both legal and political judgement in American history.
As the electoral votes are counted, the role of the vice president is further clarified to make sure that no one can argue that this official has anything other than a ceremonial role.
Most of the routes to submit false or fake voters to Congress are blocked by the ECA reform. The new law prevents multiple state officials from sending Congress competing slates because only a state's governor can submit electors to Congress.
If a governor went rogue and refused to recognize the will of the state's voters, that could cause a crisis.
Setting up a clear and streamlined legal process to adjudicate lawsuits in such a situation is what the ECA reform talks about. An expedited review, including a three-judge panel with a direct appeal to the Supreme Court, is available only for presidential candidates who are dissatisfied with the outcome of the election.
There is no system that is 100 percent safe. The ECA reform tightens the language of how an election is to be certified, limits the avenues through which bad actors can operate, and tries to ensure that if there is a dispute it can be quickly resolved in the federal courts.
2020 might have been a trial run for a coup. Bad actors at the state level can submit fake electors and dishonest actors in Congress can accept fake electors.
The end result would be confusion, litigation and chaos. There wouldn't be any authority left. Those who are willing to violate the law and seize power are the ones who fill the vacuum.
The authors think that the ECA reform will limit the potential for disorder and delay that could lead to antidemocratic opportunists.
The bipartisan group worked hard to fix the flaws of the Electoral Count Act. The spending package includes the reform.
They said that the ECA reform bill established clear guidelines for the counting and certifying of electoral votes.
The larger omnibus bill is expected to get a vote in the Senate this week and then go to the House and be signed by the president before the year ends.
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