Bills would curtail objections at future Jan. 6 vote counts
WASHINGTON — Members of Congress have officially objected to the results in four of the last six presidential elections, a partisan practice that has been legal for over a century but became much more fraught after a violent mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol last year.
In an effort to prevent another Jan. 6, 2021, bills moving through the House and the Senate would make it harder to lodge those objections when Congress counts the electoral votes in a joint session after every presidential election. The move to curtail the objections is part of a larger effort to overhaul the 1800s-era Electoral Count Act and safeguard the integrity of the vote after Trump tried to persuade his Republican allies in Congress to vote against Democrat Joe Biden’s victory and overturn his 2020 defeat.
Under current law, only one member of the House and one member of the Senate has to challenge a state’s results to trigger votes on that state’s electors in each chamber. If a simple majority in each chamber votes to sustain the objection, that state’s votes can be thrown out.
The House and Senate bills would each raise that threshold substantially, with the House bill requiring a third of each chamber to object and the Senate bill requiring a fifth of each chamber to object. The House legislation, passed last week, would also lay out new requirements for the grounds for an objection.
“It is just too easy to trigger an objection when it only requires one person in each chamber,” says Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican co-sponsor of the Senate version. Eleven GOP senators have signed on to the legislation, which is up for a vote in a Senate committee on Tuesday.
If the bills are consolidated into one measure that becomes law, it will do away with a tradition that has become increasingly popular as Congress has become more polarized.
Democrats have objected the last three times that Republicans were elected — twice against George W. Bush and once against Trump — but in each of those cases the Democratic candidate had already conceded the election.
The stakes were raised considerably in 2021, when Trump and his allies were actively trying to thwart Biden’s win, with a strategy to throw out Biden electors in Congress and the support of a violent mob that broke into the Capitol, interrupted the joint session and threatened the lives of lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence.
House Administration Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren of California, the Democratic sponsor of the House bill with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, said the bill would protect the voters’ will from “frivolous” objections and more sinister efforts.
“If you want to object to the vote, you better have your colleagues and the Constitution on your side,” Lofgren said just before the bill passed. “Don’t try to overturn our democracy.”
At the 2021 joint session, two GOP senators — Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri — joined a larger group of House Republicans in objecting to Biden’s electoral votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania, two swing states that Trump had won in the 2016 election but lost in 2020. Both the House and the Senate voted to certify Biden’s win in those states in the hours after the rioters had injured police officers, rampaged through the Capitol and sent lawmakers running for their lives. But eight senators and almost 140 members of the House voted to sustain the objections.
Congress had only held such votes twice since the enactment of the Electoral Count Act 135 years ago. In 1969, two Democratic senators joined a member of the House to object to the vote of one elector in North Carolina during the certification of Republican Richard Nixon’s victory. In 2004, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, objected to President George W. Bush’s electors in Ohio over what they said were voting irregularities.
In both cases, the House and the Senate rejected the objections.
In several other instances, members of the House have lodged objections without the support of a senator. In 2000, several members of the Congressional Black Caucus objected to Bush’s electors in Florida after the Supreme Court had forced a halt to vote-counting in that state and decided the election. Vice President Al Gore, whom Bush had defeated, gaveled the objections down as he presided over the session.
In 2016, several Democrats stood and objected to Trump’s win over Democrat Hillary Clinton but no senator joined, and Vice President Joe Biden dismissed them. Like Gore, Clinton had already conceded defeat.
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