WASHINGTON — Three years ago, the Capitol experienced a marathon day that disrupted a centuries-old tradition of peaceful transitions of power in the United States.
Hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump broke into the U.S. Capitol building as Congress met to help formalize the results of the 2020 presidential election, disrupting proceedings for hours even as some Republican lawmakers moved to reject election results in key states.
The riot shook Congress. A bipartisan group of lawmakers has crafted legislation aimed at clarifying the electoral counting process that created such uncertainty after the 2020 election.
As the country heads into a new election year that will likely see Trump on the general election ballot, experts say these changes have significantly reduced the likelihood that valid election results could be overturned by Congress or the vice president – but warned that there are still vulnerabilities within the state. and local that could be exploited.
“It’s a lot better than before it was totally obscure,” said Rebecca Green, an election law professor at the College of William and Mary. “This reform really provides many important clarifications and eliminates some of the risks that we saw manifest on January 6. »
Game-changing legislation
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, lawmakers from both parties were shaken. Many condemned the violence and called for clarification of the objection process to prevent the assault from happening again.
A bill to change the vague and vulnerable language of the 19th-century electoral count law — supported by dozens of members of both parties — was introduced in a year-end report. expense invoice signed by President Joe Biden in December 2022.
The law made significant changes. He:
- Clarification that the role of the vice president is ceremonial and does not include the power to accept or reject electors.
- Designates an official in each state to submit the state’s slate of voters, rather than allowing the possibility of multiple slates being submitted to Congress, and requires Congress to accept only that slate.
- Creation of an expedited judicial review process for electoral challenges to presidential candidates.
- Raising the threshold for objecting to a state’s election results from one senator and one representative to one-fifth of each house of Congress.
These changes significantly reduce the risk that Congress will overturn valid election results, experts said, by preventing dueling voters and requiring more consensus to formulate an objection.
“The idea is that only serious objections would be considered,” Green said. “The universe of possible problems is much smaller with this process.”
New risks and pressures
Despite these changes, experts who spoke to USA TODAY said valid election results could still be overturned.
“There are serious risks,” said Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar at Stanford University who specializes in election law. But “I think they are a little different from the risks we faced in 2020.”
“Because Congress and the vice president are going to be taken out of the game in a significant way, I think efforts are going to focus more on the states,” Seligman said, such as lobbying legislatures or state secretaries. State controlled by Republicans to make decisions. an unprecedented action. Trump’s legal team has been considering new avenues to overturn legitimate election results for years now, he added.
Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard College, agrees that state and local election officials will likely be in the spotlight.
“We have a very decentralized electoral system,” she said, creating multiple opportunities for legal disputes. “There are many potential places where things can go wrong.”
Since 2021, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party has also intensified, several experts have noted.
More than half of Trump supporters are not confident that the 2024 election results will be counted and reported accurately, according to a recent report. USA TODAY/University of Suffolk Poll. A majority of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections denied or questioned the 2020 election results. The new Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a leader in a legal effort to cancel the elections.
If Republicans retain control of the House or win the Senate, they will have the responsibility to adhere to the new electoral counting process, perhaps under immense pressure from Trump or their constituents.
How your vote gets to Congress
Before elections, state political parties typically choose people who will be voters if their presidential candidate wins. In most cases, the candidate who wins the most votes in each state claims all of their electoral votes (Maine and Nebraska use a proportional system).
Voters from the winning party meet to vote in December after the election. A copy of these votes is sent to the vice president to be counted before Congress on the following January 6. The candidate who receives the most electoral votes – at least 270 – becomes president.
This is generally an uneventful process. But as the votes are read, members of Congress can object to their counting. They are required to state why they object in writing, and under the old procedure, only one senator and one House member were required to object.
If that happens, the Senate and House are required to meet in their own chambers, debate the merits of the objection, and vote on whether to accept it. If both chambers do so, those votes are excluded from the total count.
What happened on January 6, 2021
This process took place three years ago, when Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, both Republicans, objected to Arizona’s results, citing allegations of voter fraud that had been raised in eight separate lawsuits and rejected each time.
It was the culmination of months of challenges by the Trump campaign to retain the presidency despite losing the election.
Trump and his allies pressured state and local election officials not to certify the election results; encouraged Republican electors to submit their votes and pushed officials in key states to formally recognize them rather than the duly elected Democratic slate; and pressured his Justice Department to declare a formal investigation into fraud allegations, among other efforts.
Trump had also publicly pushed Republican lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to reject voters’ votes in an effort to help him overturn the election results, or to declare the election contested in order to give legislatures States time to replace Democratic voters.
Pence said he would not do so because he did not have “unilateral authority” to reject the results, and lawmakers’ plan to overturn some states’ votes would not succeed because of the House’s Democratic majority.
But the two chambers split to debate the objection, which was supposed to be the first in a series of six — with lawmakers also planning objections to Georgia, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. The debate was interrupted when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
After the building was cleared nearly six hours later, the chambers resumed their debate and ultimately rejected Arizona’s objection. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., objected to Pennsylvania’s results shortly after midnight. This objection was overruled after 3 a.m. on Thursday, January 7, 2021. The other objections never materialized and the results were certified.
