The United States Congress on Friday finally passed legislation to amend the Electoral Count Act, an obscure piece of legislation governing the certification of presidential elections.
The bill represents the strongest effort yet to prevent a repeat of former US President Donald Trump’s violent push to reverse his loss in the 2020 election.
The House of Representatives passed the revision of the bill as part of its extensive year-end spending bill after the Senate approved the identical wording on Thursday. The bill is now being presented to President Joe Biden for signature.
In a statement on Friday, Biden welcomed the inclusion of the legislation in the spending bill, calling it “important bipartisan measures that will help ensure that the will of the people is maintained.”
It is the most significant legislative response the US Congress has made so far against Trump’s aggressive efforts to turn the popular vote on its head. And that move was pushed by a select committee in the US House of Representatives charged with investigating the events of January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol.
In its 800-page report released on Thursday, the House Committee documented internal discussions between Trump and his White House advisers about whether to violate the terms of the Electoral Count Act by refusing to count certain electoral votes.
Friday’s bill to amend the 1887 Act — which has long been criticized as bad and baffling — received bipartisan support. The new regulations would make it harder for future presidential losers to prevent the rise of their enemies, as Trump tried to do on January 6, 2021.
“It is a monumental achievement, particularly in this partisan atmosphere, to rewrite a law so fundamentally that is so important to our democracy,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. “This bill goes a long way in blocking the paths that Trump and his allies tried to use in 2020 and which could have been exploited in future elections.”
On January 6, Trump aimed for Congress to ratify the Electoral College vote. He tried to exploit the vice president’s role in reading out state voters to get Mike Pence to prevent Biden from becoming the next president by omitting some states that Biden won from the list.
The new regulations make it clear that the vice president’s duties in this process are merely ceremonial and that the vice president has no say in deciding who actually won the election.
The new legislation also raises the threshold above which members of Congress must object to voter certification. Previously, only one member of the House of Representatives and Senate had to appeal to force voters in a state to vote by roll call.
This contributed to objections to new presidents becoming a type of routine partisan tactic. The Democrats rejected the certification of George W. Bush’s two elections and Trump’s in 2016.
These objections, however, were primarily symbolic and came after the Democrats admitted that the Republican candidates had won the presidency.
On January 6, 2021, even after the violent attack on the Capitol, the Republicans forced a vote to certify Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania, as Trump continued to falsely insist that he had won the election. This prompted some members of Congress to fear that the process could be manipulated too easily.
Under the new rules, a fifth of each chamber would have to force a vote on state election lists.
The new regulations also ensure that only one electoral list enters Congress after Trump and his allies tried unsuccessfully to create alternative voting lists in states won by Biden.
Each governor would now have to sign the electors, and Congress cannot consider the lists submitted by various officials. The bill provides for legal proceedings should any of these voters be challenged by a presidential candidate.
The bill would also close a loophole that wasn’t used in 2020 but was feared by election experts: a provision that state lawmakers can name voters in the event of a “failed” election even though they disregard their state’s popular vote.
This term meant a competition that was interrupted or due to the doubt that there was no way to determine the actual winner. However, it is not precisely defined in previous law.
A state could now postpone the date of its presidential election — but only in the event of “exceptional and catastrophic events,” such as a natural disaster.
Hasen said that although the changes were significant, democracy was still at risk. In Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake was awaiting a verdict Friday in a lawsuit she filed to reverse her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs’s victory.
“No one should believe that passing this legislation means we’re off the hook,” said Hasen. “That is not one and done.”