“The Deadline That Could Hand Trump the Election; A 133-year-old law creates perverse incentives for the Trump administration—and could make a chaotic postelection period even more tumultuous.”

The Atlantic:

Many Americans know that counting all of the votes in this November’s presidential election is going to take extra time. Few people realize there’s a specific deadline by which states must finish.

The 1887 Electoral Count Act seems like an obscure piece of political trivia. But ahead of what could be one of the most contested presidential elections in modern history, some experts worry that this 133-year-old relic of the U.S. Code could endanger the whole republic. The law itself is a relic of the last time the partisan divide got so intense that it nearly ripped apart the country. But no one ever clarified the bits of it that are ambiguous, and no one ever came back to revise or update it. The law is a “morass of ambiguity, which is the exact opposite of what is required in this situation,” a group of legal scholars convened by UC Irvine wrote in an April report of possible election problems. But it’s still the law.

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