Voters in multiple states acted to protect the integrity of American democracy in Tuesday’s elections by rejecting some of the most prominent candidates who embraced lies about the 2020 election and threatened to ignore the will of the electorate.
These are crucial and heartening results, but urgent work remains to be done.
Congress now should do its part and act, in its final weeks in session, to clarify and strengthen the federal law governing the counting and certifying of electoral votes in presidential elections. It needs to do this before control of the House passes, in all likelihood, to a Republican majority.
The 135-year-old law, known as the Electoral Count Act, is chock-full of confusing and ambiguous provisions, and legal scholars have long warned that it could trigger a crisis. That’s exactly what happened after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump and his associates exploited the law’s vague and arcane language to claim that they could overturn the will of the voters. That exploitation led directly to the violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
Since then, several Republicans have joined Democrats in agreeing that a major reform to the law is necessary — a rare point of bipartisanship. The Senate introduced reform legislation over the summer, and the House passed its bill in September. While the bills contain minor differences, either would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
The most significant changes to the law would make it far harder, if not impossible, to pull off the schemes that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election and hold on to power.