Senators Said To Be Making Headway on Bill To Reform Electoral Count Act

Senators working on reforms to the 1887 law that President Trump and his supporters leaned on in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election are reportedly near a bipartisan deal and could introduce a bill on the issue in the coming days.The senators have been meeting for months on the issue — most recently Wednesday evening — and are close to agreement on a bill that would withstand a filibuster in the upper chamber, according to a report in Politico.Senator Collins of Maine, who is leading the effort on the Republican side, and Senator Manchin of West Virginia, who is working the issue from the Democratic side, have already circulated draft text of the bill and hope to send it to the Senate Rules committee any day now.“We’ve been working for months on this issue and have really done a deep dive into the problems and ambiguities that exist in this 1887 law,” Ms. Collins told Politico. “My hope is that we will wrap up our work shortly … I suspect we will introduce a bill within the coming days.”The bill aims to make it clear that the vice president’s role in the certification of votes is only ceremonial, effectively eliminating any possibility that a vice president could change the outcome of a future presidential election by not certifying the votes of the electoral college.Other measures being considered, according to Politico, include clarification of language in the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act about a so-called failed election, making it more difficult for members of Congress to challenge an election, and specifying explicitly who is allowed to send a slate of electors from the states.The Electoral Count Act governs the process by which electoral votes are certified and counted by Congress in the final step of a president’s ascension to office. Under Article II of the Constitution, states determine how presidential electors are selected and all of them — along with the District of Columbia — rely on the popular vote to do so. Electors in each state meet following the November election to cast their votes, which are then sent to Congress to be opened by the vice president in a joint session of Congress. After he lost the 2020 vote, Mr. Trump and his lawyers relied heavily on the act in their attempts to convince Vice President Pence to reject the slate of electors sent by several states and deprive President Biden of the electoral votes needed to assume the presidency. Mr. Pence ignored the edict from the president on January 6, 2021, and certified the electoral votes anyway.The committee investigating the events of January 6 is also expected to propose changes to the Electoral Count Act when it releases its final report at some point later this year. The work of Senators Collins, Manchin, and the others is a separate push that they aim to complete before the end of the year and another presidential election cycle gets under way.“My personal sense on this is, we need to move on this pretty quickly and certainly we need to get it done this year, if not this month,” the top Republican on the Senate Rules Committee, Senator Blunt of Missouri, said. “I just don’t see any reason to carry this discussion into the presidential cycle itself.”

Senators Said To Be Making Headway on Bill To Reform Electoral Count Act

Senators Said To Be Making Headway on Bill To Reform Electoral Count Act

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