By Greg Sargent
Columnist
Today at 10:47 a.m. EST
As frustrating as Sen. Joe Manchin III has been in the past year or so, the West Virginia Democrat may have found the sweet spot on a very big question: How to get 10 GOP senators to support a plan to safeguard our elections against a rerun of Donald Trump’s 2020 coup effort.
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That sweet spot is this: Demonstrate that the extraordinary new revelations we’ve seen in recent days about that coup attempt strengthen the case for reform — without mentioning Trump himself.
Manchin is leading a bipartisan group of senators who are examining how to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, or ECA, which governs how presidential electors are counted. Manchin declared Sunday on CNN that the coup effort underscored the case for action.
“What really caused the insurrection?” Manchin said. “They thought there was ambiguity” and an “avenue they could go through to overturn the election. Because there was.”
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Noting that the ECA is “not clear,” Manchin added:
When Trump declared in a statement recently that his vice president, Mike Pence, should have “overturned the Election,” this was more than a confession. It also clarified the stakes for ECA reform.
That’s because Trump’s scheme turned not just on pressure on Pence to invalidate Joe Biden’s electors. It also would have required numerous swing states to go back and “find” phony new evidence of electoral fraud to justify appointing sham electors for Trump, as outlined in that now-notorious Trump coup memo.
That’s why it’s a big deal that Manchin has now clarified that ECA reform will seek to safeguard against states sending sham electors. It’s not yet clear how the bipartisan reform would do this. But there are several options.
One way is with a judicial review process that gets triggered if a governor or state legislature departs from previously existing procedures in appointing fake electors in defiance of a state’s popular vote. Once the courts validate the real electors, Congress must count them. The bill championed by Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) would do this.
Another way, suggested by legal scholar Matthew Seligman, is that if there’s a dispute in Congress over which slate of electors to count — the real one or the fake one — a second judicial review backstop is triggered after Jan. 6, in which the Supreme Court weighs in.
The core point here is that the bipartisan group appears focused on the actual threats that loom. In 2024, a very real threat is that in an election that comes down to one state, a single GOP governor could send a fake slate of electors and a GOP-controlled Congress could count them.
As Trump rages, a new plan to prevent a 2024 coup quietly advances
Under the current ECA, those fake electors would stand. That’s why reform must build in safeguards against such a scheme at the state end, in addition to the congressional end.
(As Manchin suggested on CNN, reform will also raise the threshold for Congress to invalidate a slate of electors, to safeguard against a scheme where Congress refuses to count legitimate electors.)
Everything Trump and his loyalists are now doing, right before our eyes, underscores the need for reform. Trump’s candidate for governor in Georgia is running on an implicit promise to be willing to send fake electors if necessary.
Meanwhile, dozens of Trump loyalists are seeking positions of control over election machinery at the state level, where they might help execute such a scheme. And House Republicans’ continuing toleration or even embrace of pro-insurrectionism leaves little doubt that a GOP House would do its part.
So, now that Manchin has revealed the bipartisan group’s focus, everything Trump is doing further strengthens the case for it.
At the same time, this case is also being reinforced by revelations emanating from the Jan. 6 select committee. We’ve learned that more people around Trump were involved in this effort to get sham electors appointed than previously known.
We’ve also learned that their efforts to use the Justice Department and other government agencies to manufacture the pretext for exploiting the ECA’s ambiguities were more extensive than we thought. The Jan. 6 committee is fleshing out that full picture, and committee members have explicitly declared that one purpose of such investigative efforts is to inform how to fix the ECA.
So the way to success here might look like this: Trump will continue trying to put in place the building blocks for the next effort, even as more revelations and his own corrupt admissions keep coming, creating a backdrop that heightens the threat — and the case for ECA reform.
Meanwhile, Manchin and the GOP senators pursuing ECA reform can refrain from making it about Trump — thus making it easier for Republicans to support it — because that drumbeat will do the work for them.
And in this division of labor, whether Trump knows it or not, much of the heavy lifting will be getting done by Trump himself.
Columnist
Today at 10:47 a.m. EST
As frustrating as Sen. Joe Manchin III has been in the past year or so, the West Virginia Democrat may have found the sweet spot on a very big question: How to get 10 GOP senators to support a plan to safeguard our elections against a rerun of Donald Trump’s 2020 coup effort.
Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
That sweet spot is this: Demonstrate that the extraordinary new revelations we’ve seen in recent days about that coup attempt strengthen the case for reform — without mentioning Trump himself.
Manchin is leading a bipartisan group of senators who are examining how to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, or ECA, which governs how presidential electors are counted. Manchin declared Sunday on CNN that the coup effort underscored the case for action.
“What really caused the insurrection?” Manchin said. “They thought there was ambiguity” and an “avenue they could go through to overturn the election. Because there was.”
ADVERTISING
Noting that the ECA is “not clear,” Manchin added:
You probably noticed that Manchin didn’t specify who tried to exploit the ECA’s ambiguities to overturn the election. But his claim that a state’s ability to “change electors” before sending them to Congress is a direct reference to revelations showing that Trump tried to initiate this scheme with the full intention of subverting the election.
When Trump declared in a statement recently that his vice president, Mike Pence, should have “overturned the Election,” this was more than a confession. It also clarified the stakes for ECA reform.
That’s because Trump’s scheme turned not just on pressure on Pence to invalidate Joe Biden’s electors. It also would have required numerous swing states to go back and “find” phony new evidence of electoral fraud to justify appointing sham electors for Trump, as outlined in that now-notorious Trump coup memo.
That’s why it’s a big deal that Manchin has now clarified that ECA reform will seek to safeguard against states sending sham electors. It’s not yet clear how the bipartisan reform would do this. But there are several options.
One way is with a judicial review process that gets triggered if a governor or state legislature departs from previously existing procedures in appointing fake electors in defiance of a state’s popular vote. Once the courts validate the real electors, Congress must count them. The bill championed by Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) would do this.
Another way, suggested by legal scholar Matthew Seligman, is that if there’s a dispute in Congress over which slate of electors to count — the real one or the fake one — a second judicial review backstop is triggered after Jan. 6, in which the Supreme Court weighs in.
The core point here is that the bipartisan group appears focused on the actual threats that loom. In 2024, a very real threat is that in an election that comes down to one state, a single GOP governor could send a fake slate of electors and a GOP-controlled Congress could count them.
As Trump rages, a new plan to prevent a 2024 coup quietly advances
Under the current ECA, those fake electors would stand. That’s why reform must build in safeguards against such a scheme at the state end, in addition to the congressional end.
(As Manchin suggested on CNN, reform will also raise the threshold for Congress to invalidate a slate of electors, to safeguard against a scheme where Congress refuses to count legitimate electors.)
Everything Trump and his loyalists are now doing, right before our eyes, underscores the need for reform. Trump’s candidate for governor in Georgia is running on an implicit promise to be willing to send fake electors if necessary.
Meanwhile, dozens of Trump loyalists are seeking positions of control over election machinery at the state level, where they might help execute such a scheme. And House Republicans’ continuing toleration or even embrace of pro-insurrectionism leaves little doubt that a GOP House would do its part.
So, now that Manchin has revealed the bipartisan group’s focus, everything Trump is doing further strengthens the case for it.
At the same time, this case is also being reinforced by revelations emanating from the Jan. 6 select committee. We’ve learned that more people around Trump were involved in this effort to get sham electors appointed than previously known.
We’ve also learned that their efforts to use the Justice Department and other government agencies to manufacture the pretext for exploiting the ECA’s ambiguities were more extensive than we thought. The Jan. 6 committee is fleshing out that full picture, and committee members have explicitly declared that one purpose of such investigative efforts is to inform how to fix the ECA.
So the way to success here might look like this: Trump will continue trying to put in place the building blocks for the next effort, even as more revelations and his own corrupt admissions keep coming, creating a backdrop that heightens the threat — and the case for ECA reform.
Meanwhile, Manchin and the GOP senators pursuing ECA reform can refrain from making it about Trump — thus making it easier for Republicans to support it — because that drumbeat will do the work for them.
And in this division of labor, whether Trump knows it or not, much of the heavy lifting will be getting done by Trump himself.
