How updating a 135-year-old law could help save US democracy - Yahoo News

One of America’s last-ditch defenses against attempts to subvert presidential elections is a rickety 135-year-old antique.

This ancient structure – an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act – governs the official counting of Electoral College votes and the naming of the new president-elect. But it’s poorly written and vague in important spots. Then-President Donald Trump tested its strength with his post-vote efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate victory.

Now key members of Congress from both parties are at work on a serious effort to reinforce and perhaps expand the law. Sen. Joe Manchin, the centrist West Virginia Democrat whose opposition blocked broad voting rights legislation earlier this year, says he backs electoral count reform and that it will “absolutely” attract enough GOP support to pass the Senate.

Mr. Trump’s attempts to exploit Electoral Count Act “ambiguities” were “what caused the insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Senator Manchin said in a broadcast interview last week.

At least two key hurdles remain, however. One is politics. If Democrats try to use this reform to pass parts of their defunct voting bill, they could lose GOP support needed to overcome a Senate filibuster. Or if Mr. Trump hammers the bill enough, it’s possible he could intimidate key Republicans into backing away.

Another, perhaps deeper, problem is getting the balance in Electoral Count Act reform right. At issue is the inherent tension between federal and state power in the American system. Both Congress and the states play key roles in the post-vote counting and certification of presidential winners. Tightening rules on only one side of this equation may leave holes on the other, or even create new vulnerabilities.

“Solving this problem inherently requires trade-offs,” says Matthew Seligman, a fellow at Yale Law School who has studied the Electoral Count Act for years. “Different people are going to make different judgments about what the most important risks are.”

source: https://news.yahoo.com/updating-135-old-law-could-163603071.html

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