Opinion | A clever plan to foil a 2024 coup attempt quietly advances

A serious threat to our democracy is this scenario: A state legislature or governor appoints a slate of presidential electors in defiance of the state’s popular vote, and one chamber of Congress, controlled by the same party, counts those electors. Under current law, those electors would stand, potentially tipping a close election.

But now, these senators appear to be homing in on solutions to that problem. If they succeed, it would constitute a substantial accomplishment, thanks in part to the House Jan. 6committee’s focus on President Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow U.S. democracy.

This week, the senators are expected to reach a deal on ECA reform. Trump revealed the ECA’s vulnerabilities by pressuring his vice president and congressional Republicans to invalidate electors appointed for Joe Biden in several states, as part of a plot to get them to appoint new electors for Trump.

The belief that this was actually possible — itself a legacy of the ECA’s flaws — helped inspire the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

And so, ECA reform’s highest-profile elements would address those vulnerabilities. This would include clarifying the vice president’s role as as purely ceremonial, expressly stating that the position has no power to invalidate electors or delay their count.

It would also include raising the threshold for Congress to object to a slate of electors. Right now, only one member from both the House and Senate can force a vote on whether to cast out electors. The reform would require one-fifth of each chamber to force that vote.

But in a twist, the relentless attention on that aspect of Trump’s scheme — pressuring his vice president and congressional Republicans — has overshadowed another essential element of ECA reform: how to address corruption of the state-level process for appointing electors.

First let’s note that all states appoint presidential electors in keeping with the popular vote outcome in them, a process that states previously established with legislation.

But imagine if a state legislature or governor claims widespread-but-fictional election fraud as a pretext to violate that previously established process — and to appoint electors for the candidate who lost the popular vote.

If one chamber of Congress — say, the House of Representatives controlled by the same party those state actors and that candidate belong to — counts those electors, they’d become valid.

That’s even if the Senate objects to those electors. Under the current ECA, both chambers must object to electors to invalidate them. If one objects and the other counts them, they stand.

In short, all it takes is one state legislature or governor, in…