Lawmakers also argue that this legislation is critical, pointing to candidates running for state and federal office who could influence future elections and who believe former President Donald Trump’s election is a lie. Cheney and Lofgren said this raised concerns about “another attempt to steal the presidential election, perhaps with another attempt to corrupt the congressional process of counting the electoral votes.” “This week we will propose reforms to the Election Counting Act to protect the rule of law and ensure that future efforts to attack the integrity of presidential elections do not succeed,” Cheney and Lofgren wrote in the Wall op-ed Street. Newspaper on Sunday. The House is preparing to vote on this bill sometime this week. The text of the bill is expected to be released soon, as the House Rules Committee has scheduled a key meeting on the legislation for Tuesday. In their article, Cheney and Lofgren list four areas they hope their legislation can address. The first would be to reaffirm the Constitution and make clear that the vice president “has no power or discretion to reject official state voter rolls, delay the count in any material way, or make procedural decisions to that effect.” . After the 2020 election, Trump tried to get former Vice President Mike Pence to reject state electoral votes, something Pence never did. The proposed legislation would also make it harder for lawmakers to challenge state-submitted electoral rolls, arguing that Congress should not be a “court of last resort.” They argue that objections should require one-third of each section to be considered and maintain a majority vote. Currently, objections only need one member of the House and one senator to be raised. Third, Cheney and Lofgren say governors must transmit legal election results to Congress. They say that if a governor or other official prevents that from happening, “presidential candidates should be able to sue in federal court to ensure that Congress gets the state’s legal certificate.” They say these lawsuits should be filed before Congress counts the electoral votes. And fourth, the legislation would counter efforts by state legislatures to change the outcome of an election after it has been ratified and before it is sent to Congress, as happened in some battleground states in 2020. “The Constitution assigns an important duty to state legislatures to determine how states appoint their electors. But that should not be misinterpreted to allow state legislatures to change election rules retroactively to change the result,” Lofgren and Cheney write. . That bill would have to be reconciled with legislation proposed by a group of senators, led by Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, which was released in July.
