It would be much harder for Congress or state governments to mess with presidential election results under a draft bill Senate Democrats released Tuesday.
The discussion draft, by Sens. Angus King (I-Maine), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), is a separate effort from a bipartisan working group led by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), but the groups share a common goal: preventing another attempt to overthrow the election.
The effort seeks to modernize the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which sets out procedures for the counting of electoral votes following a presidential election. The draft bill introduced Tuesday specifies that the president pro tempore of the Senate would preside over the joint session of Congress certifying the electoral vote, not the vice president, as under current law.
On Jan. 6, Trump supporters marched on the U.S. Capitol demanding then-Vice President Mike Pence overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win, something he said he lacked the power to do.
The legislation would also set a higher threshold for mounting an objection to a state’s electoral vote count, requiring the support of one-third of both the House and Senate for an objection to be heard, and three-fifths of both chambers to successfully sustain an objection.
Under those circumstances, GOP members of Congress would not have been able to object to Biden’s win last year. After 147 Republicans voted to object to the 2020 results, the Senate began debate but was interrupted by hundreds of Donald Trump supporters who breached the Capitol.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), one of the lawmakers who objected to Biden’s win based on no evidence of widespread fraud, said Congress should be “very careful” with making changes to the Electoral Count Act.
“What the current statute provides for is debate ... I would just say I would proceed with caution,” Hawley said Monday.
Manchin said he was “tickled to death” that Democrats on the Rules Committee had introduced their own bill while he and Collins pursue their bipartisan version. Either bill would have to be approved by the Rules Committee, Manchin said, but he suggested the bipartisan approach would have a better path toward Senate approval. The bipartisan group includes 16 senators.
“We can show maybe a broader support of bipartisanship that would give them a little better diagram of what can be accepted, what could be done, rather than putting out something that’s not going to succeed with the 60-vote threshold,” Manchin told reporters Tuesday.
The bipartisan group is also discussing imposing fines for threatening election workers and clarifying the congressional certification process. The number of threats against election workers has skyrocketed over the past year in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s continued lies about the election.
A key part of the Democratic bill released Tuesday would also seek to prevent states from “going rogue” and submitting bogus electors to Congress that don’t reflect the will of the state’s voters.
Democrats initially wanted to pass a much more ambitious voting rights bill that would set minimum standards for ballot access in the states, voiding many of the changes Republican legislatures have made based on Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud. That legislation stalled after Democrats couldn’t get unanimous support from their own 50 members to change Senate rules to allow an up-or-down vote on the bill.
“We recognize that updating the Electoral Count Act is not a substitute for confronting the wider crises facing our democracy,” King, Klobuchar and Durbin said in a statement. “We continue to support legislation to protect voting rights prior to Election Day, and strongly believe that we must clarify ambiguities in the electoral process after Election Day to truly ensure the will of the voters will prevail.”