Bipartisan Group of Senators Introduce Legislation to Reform Law Trump Tried to Exploit to Overturn 2020 Election

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A group of sixteen U.S. Senators introduced legislation to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act – the act that then-President Donald Trump tried to exploit to remain in power.

The reform bill comes after months of negotiations led by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) who crossed the aisle to create legislation to stop any future presidents from repeating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and attempting to the bend the Congress to stop the transfer of power.

“From the beginning, our bipartisan group has shared a vision of drafting legislation to fix the flaws of the archaic and ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887,” said the senators in a joint statement Wednesday.

The legislation is reportedly set to come before the Senate in multiple bills, one of which will include language clarifying the vice president’s role in certifying presidential elections as purely ceremonial.

Trump’s pressure campaign to try and convince then Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes and send them back to pro-Trump state legislatures was central in Trump’s plan to circumvent the electoral results in key states in 2020. The legislation would make clear the vice president does not have the power to reject electoral votes, which Pence had argued was already the case.

Another bill, which will reportedly be introduced first, focuses on reforming the Electoral Count Act by raising “the threshold to lodge an objection to the certification of a state’s electors to at least one-fifth of the members of both the House and Senate, rather than simply one member from each chamber.”

The bill “would also provides clear guidelines for the transfer of power between Election Day and inauguration,” according to Axios’s summary of the legislation. The bill is likely to pass the 50-50 Senate as nine Republican Senators are among the sixteen who introduced the bill. Only one additional GOP vote is needed to pass the Senate’s 6–vote threshold to pass and avoid the filibuster.

The second bill creates penalties for intimidating election workers and officials, as well as new guidelines for the handling of mail-in ballots. This bill only has the support of five GOP Senators.

“We have developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for President and Vice President. We urge our colleagues in both parties to support these simple, commonsense reforms,” concluded the joint statement by the senators.

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