5,000 signatures reached
To: President Biden and Congress
Reform the Electoral Count Act
Recently in the Atlantic, we received a dire warning about the future of our elections. According to the writer, Barton Gellman, “the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup.” Rather, the loser of the next presidential contest could be certified as the president-elect using a fraudulent maneuver possible under a 140-year-old law called the Electoral Count Act.
This law must be reformed to protect our democracy from Trump and far right insurrectionists.
Why is this important?
Thanks to a memo written by Trump lawyer John Eastman, we know that Donald Trump’s lawyers outlined this path to overturning an election back in January 2021. Trump's plan was to get GOP legislatures in a handful of states to repudiate the election results and substitute presidential electors for Trump — and then secure support from a combination of Vice President Mike Pence, Congress, and perhaps the Supreme Court.
Trump's scheme was totally outrageous — and was relatively far-fetched given the politics of that time. But new reporting does indicate that at least one state's (Pennsylvania) Republican lawmakers were considering taking his side and trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. If Pennsylvania sided with him, Trump's team hoped others would follow suit.
With an increasingly anti-democratic bent in the Republican Party and more loyalists in place in key positions, a future effort seems more likely to succeed — and any vulnerabilities in the law that make that more plausible need to be fixed immediately.