How Do You Actually Stop the Steal?
Preventing the next attempt to overturn an election is a bit like playing whack-a-mole. Plug one gap in the nation’s rickety, interlocking system for counting votes—say, by ensuring that a power-hungry vice president cannot unilaterally declare his or her ticket the winner—and another pest seems to materialize immediately.
Congress is confronting this reality as it tries to rewrite a 135-year-old law governing the final, fraught act of certifying the Electoral College results—the very statute that former President Donald Trump used as a pretext to demand that then–Vice President Mike Pence anoint him the victor on . Last month, a bipartisan group of senators announced, to substantial fanfare, that it had reached an agreement to revise the 1887 Electoral Count Act. But closing off every path
