NYT:

The Electoral Count Act is both a legal monstrosity and a fascinating puzzle.

Intended to settle disputes about how America chooses its presidents, the 135-year-old law has arguably done the opposite. Last year, its poorly written and ambiguous text tempted Donald Trump into trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, using a fringe legal theory that his own vice president rejected.

Scholars say the law remains a ticking time bomb. And with Trump on their minds, members of Congress in both parties now agree that fixing it before the 2024 election is a matter of national urgency.

“If people don’t trust elections as a fair way to transition power, then what are you left with?” said Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who has been leading the reform efforts. “I would argue that Jan. 6 is a harbinger.”…

The law itself is a morass of archaic and confusing language. One especially baffling sentence in Section 15 — which lays out what is meant to happen when Congress counts the votes on Jan. 6 — is 275 words long and contains 21 commas and two semicolons.

Amy Lynn Hess, the author of a grammatical textbook on diagraming sentences, told us that mapping out that one sentence alone would take about six hours and require a large piece of paper.

“It’s one of the most confusing pieces of legislation I’ve ever read,” King told us. “It’s impossible to figure out exactly what they intended.”