Greg Sargent on Electoral Count Act Reform: “How to prevent the next Jan. 6, as revealed in an important new analysis”

WaPo column:

We cannot say we weren’t warned.

As the select committee examining the Jan. 6 violence ramps up, one of its lesser-known goals is to offer “recommendations” to prevent a future effort to overthrow U.S. democracy through violence.

As it happens, there is a critical way Congress can minimize the possibility of another Jan. 6 — by addressing glaring legal vulnerabilities in the presidential electoral process that encouraged Donald Trump’s movement to try to overturn his loss, creating the conditions for the worst outbreak of U.S. political violence in recent times.

We’re talking about revising the Electoral Count Act of 1887. That may sound dry and unexciting, but it would shore up hidden weaknesses that made the 2020 breakdown possible.

This week, a coalition of pro-democracy experts will release a new blueprint laying out a way to revise the Electoral Count Act (ECA) along those lines. The report from the National Task Force on Election Crises — which includes dozens of experts in election law and voting rights — outlines major fixes….

The ECA’s language, which sets the process for Congress to count presidential electoral votes, is vague and prone to abuse.

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