On Wednesday, the Senate Rules Committee took a crucial step in acting to fix an almost 150-year-old statute that governs presidential elections to try to prevent a replay of the sort of attack on democracy we saw on Jan. 6, 2021. At the same time, there is still at least one major flaw in the bill–and it is imperative that it be revised to ensure that the democratic election of the president not be undermined in 2024.
During the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the flaws in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 were exposed as Donald Trump sought to exploit them to overturn the free and fair election. The ECA’s ambiguous and archaic language left the door open to Trump and his lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman to attempt in December 2020 to get state legislatures to rescind their certifications of President Joe Biden’s election, to send fake electoral slates to Congress, and to make the unlawful claim that Vice President Mike Pence could reject or delay on Jan. 6 the certification of Biden’s victory.
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