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A much-needed update to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 has received a few weighty endorsements recently.
Last week, the Senate Rules Committee voted 14-1 in favor of the The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, a bipartisan effort led by Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins and West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. And Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, offered definitive support for the reform bill. Both of these developments represent important steps forward.
Maine independent Sen. Angus King, a member of the Rules Committee who released a draft proposal to update the Electoral Count Act in February, was one of the 14 yes votes in the committee. He called that vote “a critical step to better protect American democracy and remove dangerous ambiguities from our presidential elections.”
“The need for these reforms could not be more clear. In 2021, factions attempted to exploit the outdated Electoral Count Act to overturn the results of a free and fair election and stoke violence at our capitol. Now, as some continue to raise doubts about our electoral system, we must ensure that the ECA cannot [be] used as a weapon against our democracy by disappointed candidates of either party,” King said in a Sept. 27 statement. “The Electoral Count Reform Act prevents abuse of the 1887 law by clarifying the Vice President’s role in counting electoral votes, raising the threshold needed for Congressional objection to the elections, and ensuring that there are not multiple slates of electors submitted by a state. All told, this makes the process for certifying a presidential election clearer and more resistant to attack.”
That same day, McConnell spoke on the Senate floor and gave the bipartisan push even more momentum.
“This afternoon, those of us on the Rules Committee will mark up a bipartisan package of updates to the Electoral Count Act of 1887,” the senior senator from Kentucky said. “I strongly support the modest changes that our colleagues in the working group have fleshed out after months of detailed discussions. I will proudly support the legislation, provided that nothing more than technical changes are made to its current form.”
McConnell’s support seemed winnable given past comments, but still represents another milestone in the push to ensure sufficient Republican votes to overcome a potential filibuster and pass Electoral Count Act reform into law. Eleven Republican senators had already co-sponsored the legislation, likely meeting that threshold. But McConnell’s sign-off adds even more confidence that this necessary support will endure as the bill heads before the full Senate. Ten new cosponsors were announced Monday, including both McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York.
“Congress’s process for counting the presidential electors’ votes was written 135 years ago. The chaos that came to a head on January 6th of last year certainly underscored the need for an update. So did Januaries 2001, 2005, and 2017; in each of which, Democrats tried to challenge the lawful election of a Republican president,” McConnell continued last week. “Obviously, in every case, our system of government won out. The Electoral Count Act ultimately produced the right conclusion: Certainty, finality, and the transfer of power to the winning candidate. But it’s clear the country needs a more predictable path to that outcome.”
McConnell is right that Democrats have previously lodged their own objections under the Electoral Count Act. But there should be no doubt that the chaos that unfolded in January 2021 was unprecedented and requires action from Congress to help prevent it from happening again.
McConnell also made a quick but notable point at the end of his remarks, saying that this bipartisan Senate bill “is the only chance to get an outcome and make law.” The Democratic-led House of Representatives recently passed its own reform bill — not dissimilar but also not the same — and did so on a bipartisan basis. Both Maine Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden voted for that bill. But with Republican senators like McConnell indicating that they won’t budge beyond the Collins-Manchin agreement, it is clear which of the two bills offers the productive, passable way forward.
“Our bipartisan bill is backed by election law experts and organizations across the ideological spectrum and a broad cross section of Senators from both parties,” Collins and Manchin said in their own Sept. 27 statement. “We will keep working to increase support for our legislation that would correct the flaws in this archaic and ambiguous law.”
The reasonableness of this statement is in stark contrast to comments from former President Donald Trump on Friday, whose attempts to weaponize the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 led to chaos and violence on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump lashed out at McConnell and claimed the Republican Senate leader “has a death wish” for supporting Democratic-backed bills (the former president did not specifically mention the electoral count legislation in those comments).
Dangerous and unacceptable rhetoric aside, we’d suggest that rather than having a death wish, members of Congress working to reform the Electoral Count Act wish to protect the life of American democracy.
