Hasen: Jan 6. panel should safeguard 2024 vote
The special House committee investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection could provide the most comprehensive account yet of the unprecedented attempt by Donald Trump and his allies to disrupt the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election — a gift to future historians.
But the most important thing the hearings can do — given that, if someone tries to steal the next election, they won’t do it precisely the way Trump and his allies tried in 2020 — is to shift our gaze forward: They can highlight continuing vulnerabilities in our electoral system and propose ways to fix them, before it is too late.
The hearings also represent the best chance to galvanize public support to address these weak points, which is important, because the window for passing such legislation is closing; if Republicans retake the House in November, they will never put forth bills that imply the country needs protection from Trump, their kingmaker. If these hearings don’t spur action by this summer or fall, expect Congress to do nothing before the 2024 elections, at which point American democracy will be in great danger.
Any attempt to subvert the next presidential election is likely to be far more efficient and ruthlessly targeted than the last effort. It will be focused on holes and ambiguities in the arcane rules for counting Electoral College votes set forth in the Constitution and in a poorly written 1887 law, the Electoral Count Act.
There’s much that can be done to fix those problems, as a diverse group of prominent legal scholars, convened by the American Law Institute and including former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer and former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn, has suggested. To begin with, Congress can revise the Electoral Count Act to create a more robust role for federal courts in making sure that states follow their own rules for picking the winner of their Electoral College votes. Courts are not perfect, but they stood strong in 2020 against more than 60 attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn election results, and they are the best hope to deal fairly with any future conflict over the rightful winner of a state’s Electoral College votes.
Congress should also mandate that voting machines produce paper ballots that could be recounted in the event of an election dispute, provide adequate funding for fair elections, increase protection of election workers and officials against harassment and violence, and stiffen criminal penalties for interfering with official election proceedings. (Some of these provisions, like the paper-ballot requirement, were in the Freedom to Vote Act, which Democrats failed to get through the Senate this year.)
But revision of the Electoral Count Act may prove especially important. Imagine that 2024 features a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden, and Biden once again narrowly prevails in Arizona and Pennsylvania. By that year, those states may have as their governors two leaders who embrace the “big lie” that Biden’s victory was fraudulent: Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, and Kari Lake, who is making a strong bid to be the Republican nominee in Arizona. One or both could reject a state vote tally favoring Biden and attempt to send in an alternate slate of electors in 2024 favoring Trump.
On what basis could they try to reject a vote of the people? As Politico has reported, the Republican Party is instructing volunteer poll workers on how to challenge voters on Election Day, teaching them to report any issues at polling places directly to GOP-affiliated lawyers rather than to their poll-worker superiors. This disruption of the chain of command in state election machinery could easily lead to chaos and confusion, which then could serve as an excuse for someone like Mastriano to claim that Trump is the real winner.
If the role of federal courts is clarified by new legislative language, however, judges could intervene to determine that Biden actually won the state and that there was no fraud that rendered the election results suspect.
Other changes to the Electoral Count Act would also help. A new set of rules could state definitively that the vice president, who presides over the Jan. 6 counting of Electoral College votes, has no power to deprive Congress of lawfully submitted slates of electors — contrary to the outlandish argument made by the lawyer John Eastman, formerly of Chapman University. Vice President Mike Pence declined in 2021 to attempt the scheme floated by Eastman and urged by Trump, but these decisions should not be left up to individual leaders.
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