The weaknesses are in the process that does NOT go with a simple majority vote make’s the winner…….
The chances for ANY change in the process is REMOTE.….
Congress is right to address vulnerabilities in our election process. But reformers can’t simply fight the last war if they truly want to protect the presidency. When counting the results of the 2024 presidential election, Trump’s supporters won’t control the vice presidency like they did in 2020. Hence, if they want to try and seize the White House again, they will have to use new strategies that use those political institutions they do control.
At present, a House majority is perhaps the one thing Trump’s supporters seem most likely to run during the 2024 presidential election. But that alone might be enough to steal the presidency, unless and until Congress says otherwise.
Under current law, a simple majority in the House of Representatives could not only derail the process for counting electoral votes but would also appoint the person who becomes president if and when that process fails. If Congress wants to prevent this from happening, it needs to look past the Electoral Count Act to another area of law that reformers have yet to address: that governing presidential succession.
This disturbing scenario has its origins in the process that the Constitution sets out for determining who becomes president following a general election. The 12th Amendment requires that the vice president, in his or her capacity as president of the Senate, open the electoral votes received from state electors “in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives,” at which point the votes “shall then be counted.” To satisfy this requirement, Congress has traditionally convened a joint session where the House and Senate sit together to review the electoral votes and debate any issues. Once the count is finalized, the vice president reads the results to those assembled and thereby establishes who has qualified to become the official president-elect and vice president-elect…..
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To truly reduce the incentive for manipulation, Congress needs to insulate the line of presidential succession in cases of failed elections from partisan preferences. One way to do this would be to limit the line of succession to non-partisans, such as senior career civil servants. Alternatively, Congress could assign the acting presidency at random from a pool of qualified individuals or rotate it between several such individuals over time. Any of these mechanisms would make it all but impossible for a House majority to know that interfering with the electoral vote count would hand the presidency over to its co-partisans, thereby removing their incentive to do so.
If the experience of the 2020 election has shown us anything, it’s that the rules and traditions that have long governed our country are more fragile than they may seem. Congress needs to take the threat to our democratic system seriously. Doing so requires that they not just fix yesterday’s problems but look ahead and address other vulnerabilities before they can be capitalized upon….