I keep reading about fears of attempts to overturn the election, but I rarely read any mention of the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022.
It adds to and revises procedures set out in the Constitution of the United States for the process of casting and counting electoral votes for presidential elections.
In 2020, election disruptors first tried to get state legislatures to overthrow votes by fiat, then to get Congress to throw out electoral votes on January 6.
In 2024, it will be impossible to pursue either.
The dream of election deniers has been to have persons with power block election certification. Since 2020, all those people have lost at state level. This legislation closed the gaps and vulnerabilities.
The Governor of each state is now responsible for submitting certificates of ascertainment. If a county does not certify, the governor orders them to do so and if they refuse, the state’s Secretary of State takes over the function of canvassing (counting) the votes. Because this will happen well before the deadline for state certifications, there is time to enforce the certification. In 2020, the Secretaries of State all refused to budge on these issues. They all respected the process.
Under the new law, if a candidate files a claim about falsification of the electoral count, a 3-judge panel will convene immediately in the state’s capital to rule on the dispute. Appeals to the court’s judgment will go directly to the Supreme Court of the United States with no lower appeals courts in between. By law, the Supreme Court must make a decision before electors meet on December 17 to cast their votes. For those worried about this current court, they did a good job in 2020 with the cases brought before them. See https://rollcall.com/2020/12/11/supreme-court-denies-trump-election-challenge/
The Act also sets the date for the electors to convene and vote as the first Tuesday after second Wednesday in December. This is the first time that date has been dictated by Congress, cutting off legal loopholes for not submitting state votes.
No Vice President will ever have the power to change an electoral vote. The law clarifies that the vice president's role in the counting of the electoral votes is "solely ministerial," with no power to "determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper list of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.”
Next we get the count to Congress.
In 2020, there were Senators and members of the House of Representatives objecting to various state ballots. They only needed one senator or representative to lodge an objection. Now it will take 20% of both the House and Senate to lodge an objection from any state.
The law also limits the grounds for an objection to one of the following: 1.The electors of a state were not lawfully certified OR 2. An elector's vote was not "regularly given.”
If you would like even more detail, I recommend the MSNBC podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump, “Election Security Matters” https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/prosecuting-donald-trump-election-security-matters-rcna171645. That was a resource for this diary.
I hope you feel a bit better about the options that have been closed to election deniers following this election. I still worry about the potential for violence, but so many of the legal loopholes have been closed or eliminated, we should all sleep a bit better.
Thanks to those of you who encouraged me to write this diary. I don’t do many, but this seems important.
