Congress Passes New Rules For Electoral College Vote Counting – Good Start, More to Be Done

The outcomes of the January 6 Select Committee revealed that the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election were not confined to the attack on the Capitol on January 6 to prevent the counting of certified Electoral College votes.  That attack was merely the final act in a series of corrupt actions by former President Trump and various allies, in and out of Congress, to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and keep former President Trump in power, despite the expressed will of the American people that President Biden was their choice to become President.

As one of the actions to protect our Presidential elections from such corrupt manipulation in future elections, a bi-partisan Congress recently enacted changes to the Electoral College counting process known as the Electoral Count Act, or ECA.  This action contains two important changes to the current law governing the counting of Electoral College votes on January 6 and the certification of the winner and next President of the United States:

1.  The number of House and Senate members required to challenge the Electoral College vote totals certified by a state, from 1 member in each house to 20% of the members in each house.

2.  The role of the Vice President as the officer “presiding” over the vote count is clarified as purely ceremonial, with no authority to challenge, change or reject the certified vote totals from any state.

While this is of course a good first step, there is more to be done.  I do not believe it fully protects the Presidential election and certification process from attempts to corruptly manipulate the election results.  In my book, “American Turning Point: Repairing and Restoring Our Constitutional Republic”, I presented a comprehensive list of changes that would more fully protect our elections from corrupt manipulation and would go further in ensuring that our elections would be free from bias and unfair manipulation:

1.  The members of the House and Senate would have no authority to challenge the certified votes from any state during the national counting of votes on January 6.  All recounts and legal challenges to the results of an election in early November would be required to be completed by mid-December, when the states officials would certify the results.  All challenges to the validity of the state’s popular vote totals must be resolved in Federal Court under the determination of facts provided by due process in the judicial system.

The state officials certifying the election results would be the Governor, Lt. Governor and Secretary of State.  The state legislatures would have no role in the certification process after the review of all challenges is completed in mid-December.

 2.  The role of the Vice President is similarly defined as “ceremonial” with no authority to challenge, change or reject the certified vote totals from any state.

But in addition, the book discusses several other changes needed to further ensure our elections are free from bias and unfair manipulation:

1.  All states would be required to allocate Electoral College votes on the basis of the percentage of the state’s popular vote won by each candidate.  This replaces the “winner take all” method of allocating Electoral College votes today in nearly every state.  This change would eliminate the “safe” and “swing” state determinations that exist today, where a very few number of votes, as few as 0.1% of the total votes cast, results in allocating 100% of the Electoral College votes to the winner.

In 2020, this led to a corrupt effort to pressure state election officials in the swing states to change the popular vote totals by just a few thousand votes, to reverse the allocation of Electoral College votes from one candidate to the other.  But importantly for the principles of our Democratic Republic, this essentially disenfranchises the votes of millions of citizens from counting in the national election of the President and Vice President. And it results in most campaigning being focused in these swing states and the issues of importance in those states, instead of resulting in a truly national campaign on the issues of importance to most Americans.

2.  There would be no human electors involved in the process of allocating Electoral College votes.  The allocation of Electoral College votes would be a simple math calculation, based on the percentage of the popular vote total won by each candidate being applied to the total Electoral College vote total in each state.

In 2020, there was a plan to create false slates of human electors in several swing states favoring the candidate who lost the popular vote.  This was an attempt to either have the false slate of electors presented in Congress on January 6, either reversing the result of the election in that state, or to cause confusion as to which slate of electors was valid, resulting in the rejection of the Electoral College votes to the winning candidate to reduce the total, or in the decision on January 6 to have the election outcome decided in the House of Representatives instead of by the votes of the American citizens.

If these 2 additional changes would be approved by Congress and supported by a majority of the citizens in the various states, our elections for President and Vice President would be more completed protected from any attempt to unfairly manipulate the outcomes of future elections.  Our elections would be protected against all the actions attempted in the plans to overturn the 2020 elections. 

In addition, the votes by citizens supporting the candidate with less that 50% of the popular vote would still result in that candidate winning a percentage of the Electoral College vote equal to the percentage of the popular vote won in that state.  Today in a majority of states which as “safe” for one party or the other, millions of citizens supporting the minority party candidate don’t have their votes count in the national total, and they know that going in.  This cannot help buy reduce their interest in the issues of the election and in going to the polls to voice their preference.

I hope you will choose to express your support to your Congressional Representatives, and participate in the non-profit organizations that will hopefully champion these additional changes in the coming months.

These and all other changes presented in the book are summarized on the book’s website at www.citizenrules.org. As always, your comments to this post are invited and welcomed, which can be attached to this blog post or sent to me via the comment page on the book’s website. Of course, sharing this blog with your comments via your social media networks, and posting a review on the book’s amazon.com page at https://www.amazon.com/American-Turning-Point-Constitutional-Divisiveness/dp/1789049539/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8, would be much appreciated. And your interest in purchasing the book and reading the details of the changes presented in the book and the road map of actions needed to implement the changes would be most appreciated.