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Senate group introduces electoral count reform, just the first step to restoring democracy [1]
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Date: 2022-07-21
“Through numerous meetings and debates among our colleagues as well as conversations with a wide variety of election experts and legal scholars, we have developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for President and Vice President,” the Senate group said in a joint statement. “We urge our colleagues in both parties to support these simple, commonsense reforms.”
The proposed legislation would task each state’s governor with the official responsibility for submitting the state’s slate of electors, unless a state’s laws or constitution specify another party. Congress could only accept the slate submitted by the governor or other designated official. It would provide for expedited review for presidential candidates’ election disputes, providing a direct path for appeals to the Supreme Court. It is available “only for aggrieved presidential candidates and allows for challenges made under existing federal law and the U.S. Constitution to be resolved more quickly.”
A separate bill, the Enhanced Election Security and Protection Act, increases the federal penalty for people convicted of intimidating or threatening election officials, poll workers, poll watchers, voters, and/or candidates. The current penalty is one year in prison; it would increase it to up to two years. It would also clarify that federal law requires election officials to preserve election records electronically, make it illegal to tamper with voting systems and machines, and it would up the penalty for willfully stealing, destroying, concealing, mutilating, or altering election records from $1,000 to $10,000 and from one year in prison to up to two.
This is all good and necessary, but it’s just the beginning of saving our democratic system and our elections. That’s because Republican legislatures have been toiling away at rigging elections, all the way from limiting who actually gets to cast ballots to who counts those ballots to who gets to throw counted ballots out—and of course, who gets to certify elections. Making sure that Congress can certify completely corrupted elections with a clean process doesn’t make for free and fair elections.
That’s even more critical now that the Supreme Court will hear a challenge from North Carolina Republicans in a redistricting case that would give state legislatures ultimate authority over federal elections, the power to shape all the rules governing those elections in their states.
We still need the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the legislation that hasn’t passed in the Senate because Sens. Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have refused to get rid of the filibuster to pass it.
Want to stop Mitch McConnell from taking over the Senate and help make Joe Manchin irrelevant at the same time? You can help by clicking here and signing up to write postcards to Democratic-leaning voters in key Senate swing states.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/21/2111625/-Senate-group-introduces-electoral-count-reform-just-the-first-step-to-restoring-democracy
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