With mid-term elections looming this fall, Democrats continue to push for large voting rights legislation. But a small bipartisan group of lawmakers is looking to reform one stand-alone bill: the Electoral Count Act.
In short, it lays out how Congress counts electoral college votes from each state, especially when there’s a dispute. That happened in the 1876 presidential election.
“You know there were a lot of allegations of fraud in that election. Four states ended up sending different slates of electors to Congress,” explained election integrity expert, Hans Von Spakovsky, with the Heritage Foundation.
A decade later, the Electoral Count Act established a joint session of Congress to oversee the counting of electoral votes. During that process, any written objection to the votes from at least one House member, and one senator, sends lawmakers back to their respective Houses to consider the objection.
The power to sustain or overrule it is placed fully with Congress.
That played out after the 2020 election. The law is back in the spotlight because former President Donald Trump, and others, insist Vice President Mike Pence had the power to throw out certain election results.
“They were hoping that there would be objections made under the act by a member of the House, a member of the Senate to the electoral votes coming from particular states; places like Georgia and Arizona, and then there would be a debate about whether they should be sustained or overruled,” Spakovsky told CBN News.
“They were all overruled and so the Vice President did not have the power to then somehow change what the Senate had decided and what the House had decided. I think there were folks hoping he would do that, but he just didn’t have the power to do that neither under the statute or under the Constitution,” he continued.
Spakovsky says the Vice President’s role in certifying election results is purely ministerial, which means he really doesn’t have any power at all. A point Pence himself recently addressed.
“I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone and frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that anyone person could choose the American president,” Pence said.
While Spakovsky sees 2020 as an example of the Electoral Count Act working, a bipartisan group of lawmakers feels the need to be clarified.
“We saw on January 6th of 2021 how ambiguities in the law were exploited. We need to prevent that from happening again,” Sen. Susan Collins told ABC’s This Week.
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) says he’s confident a bill reforming the Electoral Count Act will pass.
“What really caused the insurrection? They thought there was an ambiguity if you will, and an avenue they can go through and overturn the election. Because there was, it was not clear. And when one congressman and one senator can bring a state’s authentic count to a halt, that’s wrong,” Manchin said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Spakovsky says an amendment to the Electoral Count Act would not have prevented what happened on January 6th.
“Many of the people that were protesting would have been unhappy about anything that happened, any process unless President Trump was declared the winner of the election,” he said.
Meanwhile, some Democrats believe that a focus on just the Electoral Count Act will reduce any urgency to pass larger voting rights bills.
Republicans worry Democrats could use the process to work in some of the measures they haven’t been able to get through Congress.
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