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It’s a scary time in America. And no, we don’t mean Halloween.
According to a national poll of over 1,000 Americans released last week, over 60 percent of respondents said they think post-election day violence is either somewhat likely or very likely. This haunting prospect of political violence, sadly, isn’t theoretical.
The 2020 election culminated with a violent and abhorrent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump, which flew in the face of our country’s tradition of a peaceful transfer of power even as it failed to deter members of Congress from ultimately certifying Joe Biden’s victory. The horrific examples of political violence have not stopped there, with two vile assassination attempts targeting Trump this year. Alarming reports about ballot drop boxes being targeted for arson in Oregon and Washington state certainly don’t quell any fears about what the coming days and weeks could look like.
It does not have to be all doom and gloom, however. Beyond once again stressing that political violence is never acceptable, and must be rejected over and over in our democracy, there is also reason to head into next week’s election confident that at least some of the chaos of the 2020 election won’t be possible this time around.
Thanks to action from Congress in 2022, with Maine’s two senators at the vanguard, the archaic and unclear federal law that outlines the process for counting electoral votes got a much needed update. Republican Sen. Susan Collins led the Electoral Count Reform Act, shepherding it successfully through a divided Congress with Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. And Sen. Angus King co-sponsored the bill after previously introducing his own discussion draft proposal and advancing discussion about electoral count reform as a member of the Senate Rules Committee.
“The events of January 6, 2021, made it starkly apparent that structural flaws in the archaic and vaguely written Electoral Count Act of 1887 could be exploited to undermine the results of future Presidential elections,” Collins said in a statement to the BDN editorial board, before outlining ways that her legislation “enacted a number of important reforms and clarifications to correct the most glaring problems.”
The bill took several important steps, including a clarification that the vice president’s role in certifying electors is purely ceremonial. This should slam the door shut on Trump’s incorrect and irresponsible insistence that then-Vice President Mike Pence could reject results from various states in 2020. It also should provide some comfort that current Vice President Kamala Harris has no ability to impact the count during this election in which she is at the top of the ticket (not that we would expect her to try, but public perceptions matter).
“Second, and perhaps most significant, the law provides clear parameters to Congress for identifying each state’s single, conclusive slate of electors,” Collins added. This would undercut a repeat of the chaotic effort by some Trump allies to submit alternate electors in 2020 and essentially upend the expressed will of voters in those states. The update also removed old and unclear language about a “failed election” that could have allowed nefarious state officials to frame undesired election results as “failed” election results.
The 2022 reforms also included a provision for expedited judicial review of election challenges in federal court, to ensure that these challenges are heard in a timely way, and it drastically raised the bar for potential count challenges by members of Congress. Previously, it took only one senator and one representative to launch a challenge. Now, it will require one-fifth of the members in each the Senate and House to make such a challenge. This significantly higher standard should hopefully make groundless challenges much less likely.
“All of these reforms combine to produce a system that is much clearer, less likely to be manipulated, and fair to the candidates,” Collins said, and we could not agree more. We remain thankful that she, King and a strong bipartisan group of lawmakers rallied around these needed reforms.
In an interview with the editorial board on Tuesday, King called the reform effort “a huge improvement” but allowed that there still could be “mischief” in the election. He highlighted how our electoral system ultimately relies on officials doing the jobs they have sworn to do. He was particularly concerned about intimidation and threats of violence directed at election officials.
“It all still rests upon people,” King emphasized.
Half the country is going to be disappointed by this presidential election, no matter how it turns out. That won’t mean that it has been stolen or rigged. In the same poll we mentioned earlier, 77 percent of people said that they would be willing to accept the election results even if their preferred choice does not win. While we’d like that number to be right around 100 percent, we still take it as a cautiously hopeful sign — like the Electoral Count Act reforms — that the 2020 election nightmares won’t come back to haunt this country.
Collins, King and other lawmakers have provided us with some clearer rules of the road this time around, which should hopefully help avoid the specific chaos we saw on Jan. 6, 2021. It also falls to us, the American people, to repudiate the chaos and violence we saw nearly four years ago. We do that by respecting the process, respecting each other, and by refusing to confuse disappointing results with invalid results.
