New election law reform aims to head off repeat of Jan. 6 insurrection

A provision tucked into in the omnibus spending bill signed by President Joe Biden this week is intended to lessen the chances of a repeat of the Jan. 6 insurrection in the future.

The Jan. 6 insurrection started after former Republican President Donald Trump publicly called on his then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to accept state-certified slates of electors supporting Trump's Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.

Trump falsely insisted that the 1887 law governing how electoral votes are counted gave Pence the authority to throw out those electors, and choose alternate electors that would overturn the election results and keep Trump in the White House.

The former president called for his supporters all over the country to come to Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, to pressure the vice president to do just that.

"The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump tweeted the day before the insurrection.

"All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike! This is a time for extreme courage!" the former president tweeted on Jan. 6, 2021.

Some protestors that day even threatened to hang Pence after he refused to go along with Trump’s plan.

Ever since, Congress has been talking about rewriting the old law.

Meredith College political science professor David McLennan says there was initially some pushback from Republican members of Congress who argued a rewrite was unnecessary. But other Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), agreed with Democrats who said it was needed to make another event like the Jan. 6 insurrection less likely to happen again.

Thanks to a bipartisan push in the Senate, the "Electoral Count Reform Act" made it into the spending package at the 11th hour, just as Congress was wrapping up its work for the two-year session.

"It doesn't prevent things like protests. What it does is, it puts a mechanism in place to make it more difficult for Congress to change the will of the people," McLennan told WRAL News.

McLennan says the new law clarifies vague language in the 1887 law about the authority of the vice president in the electoral count process.

"It basically makes the vice president a ceremonial role, so [the issue] is really in front of the [House and Senate] chambers," McLennan explained. "And also, it makes it more difficult for states to propose alternate slates of electors, which a number of states did that were Republican-controlled in 2021. So, it really just eliminates any confusion and chances of mischief within Congress itself."

The new law also increases the threshold for objecting to electors from a single Congressional member or senator to one-fifth of each chamber. And, it includes an additional $75 million for election security in the future.

"[The] $75 million is really just about $1.5 million per state, which doesn't really help all that much, but it's a step forward," McLennan said. "The good news is that 2022 was a fair and safe election, so we can look at that and say, 'Well, $75 million will make it even more safe and secure.'"