House Democrats will vote this week on changes to a 19th-century law to certify presidential elections, their strongest legislative response yet to the Jan. 6 uprising on Capitol Hill, and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat.
The vote to revise the Electoral Count Law, scheduled for Wednesday, comes as a bipartisan group of senators is moving forward with a similar bill. Lawmakers from both parties have said they want to change the arcane law before it is challenged again.
Trump and his allies tried to exploit the vague language of the law in the weeks after the election as they strategized to keep Joe Biden out of office, including pressing Vice President Mike Pence to simply oppose the certification of victory for Trump. Biden when Congress counted the votes on January 6.
Pence refused to do so, but it later became clear that there was no real legal framework, or recourse, to respond under the 1887 law if the vice president had tried to block the count. The House and Senate bills would better define the vice president’s ministerial role and make it clear that he or she has no say in the final outcome.
Both versions would also make it harder for lawmakers to object if they don’t like the results of an election, clarify laws that could allow a state’s vote to be delayed, and ensure there is only one list of legal electors from each state. One strategy of Trump and his allies was to create alternative lists of electors in the key states Biden won, with the idea, ultimately unsuccessfully, that they could be voted on during congressional certification on January 6 and result in for Trump to return the election.
“We have to make this easier to respect the will of the people,” said Senate Rules Committee Chair Amy Klobuchar, D-Min., whose committee will vote on the bill next week. “We don’t want to risk Jan. 6 happening again,” she said.
The bills are a response to the violence that day, when a mob of Trump supporters pushed past police, stormed the building and disrupted Biden’s certification. The crowd echoed Trump’s false claims about widespread voter fraud and called for Pence’s death after it became clear he would not try to nullify the election.
[Con información de The Associated Press]
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