Trump attacks spur Congress to bolster electoral count law

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s relentless, false claims about the 2020 presidential election have sparked fresh urgency in Congress — and in both parties — for changing the Electoral Count Act to ensure no one can undo a future presidential election.

Lawmakers are working furiously to update the 135-year-old law that was put in place in the aftermath of the Civil War and came perilously close to unraveling on Jan. 6, 2021. At that time, the defeated president urged his followers to “fight like hell” over the election and pressured Vice President Mike Pence to ditch his ceremonial role presiding over the session and reject the results.

While Pence ignored the president’s demands that day, Trump continues to insist the vice president “could have overturned the election” — a deeply troubling development as the former president considers another White House run.

“President Trump’s comments underscored the need for us to revise the Electoral Count Act, because they demonstrated the confusion in the law and the fact that it is ambiguous,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters at the Capitol.

The outcome of the bipartisan effort in Congress remains highly fluid, and could easily collapse, especially as Republicans are wary of crossing Trump and Democrats seek broader changes after their own sweeping elections and voting legislation fell apart last month. Any update to the 19th century law would likely face the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold in the Senate, meaning the legislation would need bipartisan support in the evenly split chamber to advance.

Yet the effort to change the Electoral Count Act has been gaining political currency, especially with Trump edging toward another run. The urgency has continued to rise over the past year as the former president and his allies have led a steady drumbeat in state legislatures, working to install sympathetic leaders in local election posts and, in some cases, backing political candidates who participated in the riot at the Capitol.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday he’s open to the effort, as he also rejected the idea Trump floated at a weekend rally of pardoning people who have been criminally charged in the deadly riot at the Capitol.

”What we saw here on January the 6th was an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another,” McConnell said.

The Kentucky Republican went on to say the Electoral Count Act “is flawed and it needs to be fixed.” He also said of those charged criminally in the riot, ”I would not be in favor of shortening any of the sentences for any of the people who pleaded guilty.”

A bipartisan group led by Collins, the rare and frequent Republican Trump critic, has been meeting behind closed doors and hopes to present a draft as soon as this week.

Senators are delving into potential changes to Electoral Count Act with ideas that would make it more difficult to challenge results. They are also considering ways to protect election workers, who are being harassed at alarming rates nationwide, and funding for election assistance and voting equipment. Some 16 senators, Republicans and…