Vice President Kamala Harris threw shade at the prospect of reforming presidential election procedures in Congress that could avert another last-ditch bid to overturn the results.
During an interview airing on the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riot, PBS anchor Judy Woodruff told Harris that Democrats don’t appear to have enough support to pass voting rights legislation and asked why a Republican counteroffer to revise the Electoral Count Act, effectively changing the way the Electoral College vote count takes place, would not a be an acceptable compromise.
“It’s not a solution to the problem at hand,” she said on PBS NewsHour. “We need federal laws that guarantee the freedom and right of every American to have access to the ballot, to be able to vote.”
REFORM THE ELECTORAL COUNT ACT
The ECA, which was passed in 1887, lays out the process for counting and certifying votes after a presidential election. It has drawn renewed scrutiny in the past year after former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to test the limits of the Electoral College process with a plan to enlist members of Congress and put pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to stall the Jan. 6 certification and send electoral votes back to several battleground states where GOP-led legislatures could try to overturn the results over concerns about fraud and irregularities.
Harris and top Democrats in the Senate have pushed for voting reform bills, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, that would adjust the rules for how states conduct their elections in a way that proponents say would combat voter disenfranchisement. Currently, however, the party doesn’t seem to have enough votes in a 50-50 split Senate.
In the meantime, Republicans in Congress have signaled an openness to reforming the ECA, which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said “obviously has some flaws. And it is worth, I think, discussing,” according to Politico. “With the Electoral Count Act, as we saw last time around, there are some things there that, I think, could be corrected,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune told Axios.
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But the notion of a counteroffer might be a no-go, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer appeared to reject the idea of reforming the ECA during a speech Thursday.
“As we know too well, state legislatures are working day and night to undermine our democratic process from the get-go,” he said. “What good is it to accurately count a result that’s compromised from the start?”
