When the Senate first took up the reform of the Electoral Count Act, I wrote a column about the potential pitfalls of the effort. Now that a bipartisan group has produced a bill, I’m happy to report that those pitfalls have been avoided. I go through the main reforms and why they are worth making. An excerpt:
One of the faults of the existing law is that it obscures the distinction between the two stages of presidential elections: the general election by which the electors are chosen, and the vote of the electors themselves. The reform clarifies that the role of Congress is to review that second stage, and not to use that review as a pretext for second-guessing the first.