Click here to subscribe today or Login.
The last week has been discouraging for the increasing number of Americans concerned about maintaining the integrity of elections.
That’s because of the way leaders of both parties have exacerbated, by word and deed, both the substance and perception of current federal and state voting problems.
The only current bright spot is the possibility that lawmakers will yet act in one key area — to prevent a repetition of last January’s near disaster when supporters of Donald Trump tried to prevent congressional certification of the 2020 election results.
That action is long overdue. But it won’t fully compensate for the ways the current situation is being made worse, not better. Here are three recent examples:
• The Senate’s refusal to act on two far-ranging election reform bills passed earlier by the House: the Freedom to Vote Act, providing uniform online registration, curbs on congressional gerrymandering and voting guidelines for the states, and the bill named for civil rights icon John Lewis, restoring the Voting Rights Act’s federal review powers prematurely terminated by the Supreme Court.
The main onus here is on Senate Republicans who refused to consider any aspects of the measure. But the situation was hardly helped by the resistance of moderate Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to rules changes to facilitate action they claimed to favor.
• President Joe Biden’s unfortunate comments questioning the integrity of the 2022 elections if Congress fails to pass the two election reform measures. The White House later withdrew them but given Trump’s repeated questioning of the 2020 election’s fairness, the last thing Americans need is for the leaders of both parties — admittedly for different reasons — casting broad doubt about election integrity.
Their reasons are parallel, though different. Trump’s unproven contentions of fraud, which have undermined GOP confidence in the voting system, stem mainly from objections to expanding voting, largely through relaxing absentee ballot rules. Biden’s concerns stem from the federal failure to curb state restrictions that critics contend would reduce voting by minorities.
• One negative impact of a new Texas election law was evident when several large counties rejected hundreds of applications for mail ballots on technical grounds like failure to include proper ID numbers. It prompted 10 Texas House members to urge the Justice Department to monitor the situation.
This is exactly the kind of problem Democratic opponents warned about when the new laws were passed. Both the new restrictions — and the secretary of state’s “audit” under pressure from Trump — are aimed at large metropolitan counties where increased minority populations have swelled Democratic turnouts.
Interestingly, both blocked Senate voting bills are popular with the public. Morning Consult polling in Politico’s Playbook showed a majority favor the broader measure’s key provisions: expanding same-day registration, early voting, and voting by mail; automatic voter registration; prohibiting partisan gerrymandering; and making Election Day a federal holiday.
Similarly, a poll last fall by Navigator Research, a project of several progressive political organizations, showed that more than two-thirds back the voting rights bill, including half of Republicans.
Unfortunately, majority public support doesn’t mean majority Senate support, where the Republicans’ 50% represents well under half of the American people.
Meanwhile, members of both parties are showing increased interest in amending the flawed 1887 Electoral Count Act.
They hope to prevent a repetition of what happened last January when Trump sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to ignore some state electoral vote certificates, a rampaging mob overran the marble halls of Congress, and dozens of Republican lawmakers signed onto Trump’s false claims of election fraud in seeking to prevent Congress form certifying Biden’s victory.
One goal would be to make clear that, in presiding over the joint session that counts the electoral votes, the vice president’s role is totally ceremonial.
Trump and his allies argued (but Pence rejected) that the vice president has discretion in deciding any challenged electoral votes. In fact, it’s up to the House and Senate members themselves.
Another useful change would be to amend the provision allowing the objections of a single senator and a single representative to force a debate and vote on accepting a state’s electoral votes. Members of both parties have taken advantage of that provision in recent certification sessions.
It should be strengthened to require objections from a substantial portion of members, perhaps one third of both the Senate and the House. Last year, only a handful of senators joined a majority of House Republicans in forcing debates and votes on the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Another useful change would limit challenges to situations with at least two legitimate claims to a state’s electors. In their zeal to overturn the popular results, the Trump campaign apparently drafted fraudulent statements from GOP electors in seven states, contending that Trump carried those states when in fact he lost.
Both Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have expressed openness recently toward doing something. Most importantly, a bipartisan group headed by Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins is working on the issue, raising hopes any revision could attract the 60 Senate votes needed to pass.
Still, even if Congress fixes this ambiguous law, public confidence in the nation’s electoral system will remain in doubt if top leaders from both parties continue to question it.
Carl Philipp Leubsdorf is an American journalist and columnist. He is currently a Washington columnist for The Dallas Morning News, where he was Washington bureau chief from 1981 through 2008.