I have written this piece for The Atlantic. It begins:

The 2020 election and its aftermath have laid bare an unhappy truth: Many of the familiar procedures for translating the people’s will into the choice of a president depend on norms of behavior, not laws. Just this past weekend—two months after Election Day—remarkable efforts to mess with election results became apparent, including the revelation of a recording of, on Saturday, President Donald Trump potentially criminally pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” more than 11,000 votes to flip Georgia’s election results from Joe Biden to the president. And well over 100 Republican representatives and about a dozen Republican senators appear poised to object to the counting of Electoral College votes on Wednesday for states that Biden won, despite a complete lack of evidence that the results were marred by fraud or irregularities. These efforts are very serious—and very dangerous.

If not for Biden’s significant margin of victory over Trump and for the courageous, politically risky actions of many Republican and Democratic election administrators and elected officials, this Republican attack on American democracy might well have been successful, securing an illegitimate second term for Trump.

To remove the potential for this sort of gamesmanship in certifying and counting each state’s votes for president, the country needs to adopt a number of measures in the next few years to eliminate the power of individuals to interfere with election results. This can be done without opening up larger constitutional issues, such as whether to keep or do away with the Electoral College. Americans shouldn’t have to know the inner workings of the canvassing board of Wayne County, Michigan—or depend on representatives and senators to accurately count votes as states have reported them to Congress—to figure out who will be president.