Congress modifies the electoral certification law to prevent a candidate from trying to reverse the results

By Nicholas Riccardi -

Congress on Friday gave final approval to legislation changing the law governing the certification of a presidential election, the strongest action yet taken to prevent a repeat of the virulent campaign encouraged by Donald Trump to reverse the election results. which he lost in 2020.

The House of Representatives approved a revision to the Voter Recount Act as part of its huge year-end spending bill, after the Senate approved an identical text on Thursday.

The measure will be sent to President Joe Biden for signing into law.

Donald Trump speaks by phone from the Oval Office on the morning of January 6, 2021, hours before his supporters stormed the Capitol.AP

Biden praised the inclusion of the provisions in the spending bill in a statement Friday, calling it a "key bipartisan action that will help ensure the will of the people is preserved."

It is the most significant legislative response Congress has yet made to Trump's aggressive efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, a step that had been urged by the House select committee that carried out the most comprehensive investigation into the violent siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Provisions changing the 1887 law - which has long been criticized as poorly and confusingly worded - won bipartisan support and would make it harder for future presidential losers to prevent their adversaries from reaching the White House, just as Trump tried to do on Thursday. January 6, 2021.

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“This is a monumental achievement, particularly in this partisan atmosphere, for such a major rewrite of a law that is so crucial to our democracy,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“This law goes a long way to close the avenues that Trump and his allies tried to use in 2020, and that could have been exploited in future elections,” he said.

On January 6, Trump tried to prevent the ratification of the Electoral College vote that Congress was holding.

He tried to exploit the role that his vice president played in the reading of the voters of the states so that Mike Pence blocked Biden as the new president, omitting some states that the Democrat won.

The new provisions make it clear that the vice president's responsibilities in the process are merely ceremonial and that he has no say in determining who actually won the election.

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The new legislation also raises the threshold for members of Congress to oppose voter certification.

Before, only a member of the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively, had to oppose it to force a roll call vote on the voters of a state.

That helped make objections to new presidents a routine partisan tactic: Democrats opposed certifying both George W. Bush's and Trump's 2016 elections.

Those objections, however, were mostly symbolic and came after Democrats had conceded that Republican candidates won the presidency.

On January 6, 2021, Republicans forced a vote to certify Biden's victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania, even after the violent attack on the Capitol, while Trump continued to falsely insist that he had won the election.

That led some members of Congress to worry that the process could be too easily manipulated.

Under the new rules, one-fifth of each house would be required to force a vote on state voter rolls.

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The new provisions also ensure that only one voter list reaches Congress, after Trump and his allies tried unsuccessfully to create alternative voter lists in states Biden won.

From now on, each governor must give their approval to the voters, and Congress will not be able to consider the lists presented by different officials.

The bill creates a legal process should any of those voters be challenged by a presidential candidate.

The legislation would also close a loophole that was not used in 2020 but that election experts feared could be used: a provision that allows state legislatures to nominate electors in defiance of their state's popular vote in the event of a "failed" election. ”.

That term has been understood as a contest interrupted or so doubtful that there is no way to determine the actual winner, but it is not well defined in the previous law.

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Now a state can change the date of its presidential elections, but only in the event of "extraordinary and catastrophic events," such as a natural disaster.

Hasen said that while the changes are significant, dangers to democracy remain, noting that in Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake was awaiting a ruling Friday in a lawsuit she filed to overturn the victory. from her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs.

"Nobody should think that passing this law means we're out of the woods," Hasen said.

"This is not a done thing."