“A Promising New Electoral Count Act Reform Proposal”

Yuval Levin of AEI for the National Review. Here’s a couple of paragraphs:

This is a very good set of reforms. The bulk of them are directed to avoiding a repeat of the sorts of problems we saw in 2020 — a situation in which the states all did their jobs but members of Congress, at the behest of the defeated incumbent president, moved to sow doubt about the outcome by capitalizing on the vagueness and looseness of the ECA. Because the bad actors in that case were in Congress, there is a fair amount of room for Congress to address the problems revealed in the process. Most of the provisions of the ECA function in effect as a set of House and Senate rules, and indeed are adopted as such by both houses every four years, and so revising them is well within the purview of the Congress.

Some Democrats wanted to go further, and give the federal courts more jurisdiction over the ways in which state officials enforce state election laws. This was a disastrously misguided idea, and it is very good that this proposal avoids any such path. This is a significant success for a number of Republicans who fought hard against that approach — particularly Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney. And it is the reason why I think this bill could get enough Republican votes to pass the Senate. The restraint shown in this proposal suggests this bipartisan group really wants to get these reforms enacted.

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