“There is a moral obligation to act,” one voting-rights expert said, of safeguarding elections in the U.S. “It is not the end of the battle.”
sought to elect state and federal officeholders who support his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen and would likely do so again should Trump run and lose in 2024. Recently, some Senate Republicans have voiced support for reforming the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which determines how electoral votes are counted. Any fix would hope to prevent one specific subversion scenario in which Congress or the Vice-President tries to overturn the results.
It would absolutely have been better if it had been taken up earlier in the Administration. But there was a lot of work done to build consensus in the Democratic caucus and to obtain Republican support. Then there was a lot of work to renegotiate the bills in order to satisfy Senator Manchin. Do you think Democrats have overemphasized the threat of voter suppression and underemphasized the threat of election subversion?
The Electoral Count Act absolutely has ambiguities that need to be fixed, and, if they are addressed, that would help reduce the risk of a certain form of sabotage at the very end of Presidential elections.
How do you differentiate between reforms that you support, such as early voting, and reforms that are necessary to protect democracy, if you do differentiate between them at all? I agree that, in the abstract, voting by mail is easier to subvert than polling-place voting, but the legislation that was before Congress actually precludes that. It identifies all those areas of vulnerability and clarifies how they should work so that subversion can’t happen.