Most of the attention for Electoral Count Act reform has focused on the bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. Susan Collins (R‑ME) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D‑WV), the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA). Now, however, another ECA reform bill has been introduced in the House by Rep. Liz Cheney (R‑WY) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D‑CA), dubbed the Presidential Election Reform Act (PERA).
Lofgren is the chair of the Committee on House Administration, which has jurisdiction over election law matters, and both Lofgren and Cheney also serve on the January 6th Committee, which Cheney vice-chairs. The House apparently intends to move quickly on the Lofgren-Cheney bill, which will be taken up by the House Rules committee this afternoon, with a vote by the full House expected by the end of the week. In contrast, the Collins-Manchin bill is slated for a committee markup in the Senate Rules committee later this month, on September 27.
The two bills are broadly similar in most respects, but with some key differences that will have to be reconciled. It is likely some of these changes will be reflected in amendments made to the Senate’s bill, with amendments expected to bring the two closer together in at least some respects.
Broadly speaking, the new House bill reflects a more aggressive approach to constraining the various actors involved in the presidential election process: state legislatures, state governors and executive branch officials, the National Archives, the vice president, and Congress. In some respects, that makes it a more conservative and originalist bill, keen to limit the discretion of political actors in what is supposed to be a mandatory and fundamentally non-discretionary constitutional process. To do this, PERA provides more specific and concrete limits in the law itself, and it also provides a somewhat more expansive role for the federal courts in enforcing those provisions.
Here are the key provisions in the House’s PERA bill, how they differ from the current draft of the Senate’s ECRA bill, and some thoughts about which provisions are the likeliest to be incorporated into a reconciled bill.
Read the rest of this post →