Congress protects electoral system in an important bipartisan vote

This nation owes a debt of gratitude to Congress for passing the Electoral Count Reform Act as part of the $1.7 trillion year-end funding bill in one of the last acts of the lame-duck session.

The process was relatively swift, by congressional standards. Introduced in July, the bill was drafted by a working group of bipartisan senators. Just before Christmas, the Senate passed the bill on a strong bipartisan vote. The House passed it the following day. President Joe Biden later signed it and the funding bill into law.

The sin of the original act was the vagueness of its language. Yet it too was an attempt to clarify the boundaries of the relationship between elections and elected officials.

The Electoral Count Act of 1887 also resulted from claims of a stolen election, but it was Democrats alleging the steal. Locked in a tight battle in 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden both claimed victory in states with unclear results: South Carolina, Louisiana and, wouldn’t you know it, Florida.

According to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in presidential politics, Republican-controlled electoral returns boards in those three states claimed that fraud, intimidation and violence invalidated some votes. The boards threw out enough Democratic votes for Hayes to be declared the victor. It took a decade for Congress to agree on the language of the act, which may account for its vagueness.

This time, it took less than two years for Congress to recognize the loophole that allowed President Donald Trump to make the claim that Vice President Pence, in his capacity as president of the Senate, could change the results of the 2020 election.

Mr. Pence said earlier this year that not only was Mr. Trump flatly wrong, but also that “frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

The new version of the Electoral Count Act makes clear that the role of vice president in administering the count is ceremonial. But the act goes further. It raises the threshold to challenge electoral votes during joint session, so that one or two members cannot hold the process hostage.

It also makes clear that state legislatures cannot, after the fact, appoint electoral slates that would contravene the will of the voters. In addition, it requires that electoral votes received by Congress accurately reflect each state’s electoral results. That includes the right of candidates to go to court should a “rogue governor” attempt to send invalid electors.

These are all necessary clarifications and improvements over the original bill. It does much to safeguard future elections. This is a significant achievement for the protection of democratic institutions.