How electoral vote counting has changed since Jan. 6: NPR

The biggest difference between January 6, 2025 and January 6, 2021 will be obvious.

Instead of falsely claiming that he won the election in a speech 2 miles from the US Capitol, in which he incited a mob of his supporters to violently disrupt the counting of electoral votes, Donald Trump will be certified as the winner by Congress.

This change has radically affected all aspects of the post-election period. Election officials say their offices don’t get the same nasty phone calls. Surveys show that the majority of Americans trust the results. But there is perhaps no greater contrast in this cycle than during the proceedings on Monday.

“January 6 is the date, if there is one date, when we witness the peaceful transfer of power in the United States,” said Rick Pildes, an election law expert at New York University. “In many ways, it’s the most important moment of democracy. … And of course, this January 6th will have in the background the resonances of what happened in (the aftermath of) the 2020 (election).”

In many ways, experts expect certification at the Capitol to return to what it looked like before 2020: a simple bureaucratic move that makes official an outcome Americans have long known.

But there will be subtle ways in which the course of the year will also be different.

In response to the chaos four years ago, Congress passed new rules to govern and clarify the presidential certification process. After the last election, Trump’s legal team had tried to exploit the previous framework, which legal experts had widely considered full of ambiguities.

“It was very poorly prepared,” said Pildes, who was one of them key legal voices advises a bipartisan group of lawmakers as they draft the update, known as the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA). “The one thing you want in a legal framework to resolve a contested election — and this is true of any election, but especially the presidential election — you want a clear legal framework that’s established in advance so that it can’t be manipulated to be partisan purpose in the moment of crisis.”

This is the first presidential election certified under the new law, which clarified how the states finalized their results in December. Here are some of the key changes that will affect Monday’s proceedings.

Objections need merit – and more support

Previously, it only took a single member of the House and one of the Senate to sign an objection to send the issue into a potentially days-long debate period with no clear decision if the two chambers then disagreed with each other on their respective votes on the objection.

The prior law was also unclear as to what kind of question might motivate a challenge.

However, ECRA significantly raises the bar for contesting election results (which have already been certified by each state). Now, an objection is only valid if it is signed by one-fifth of each house of Congress.

And the law significantly narrows the reasons a legislature can challenge results, essentially making clear that partisan differences over electoral policies in a particular state are not a valid reason to challenge the state’s results.

Even before 2020, when more than 100 Republican members of the House and Senate protested the results in response to Trump’s false claims, objections had begun to emerge. more common as the electoral processes of 2000, 2004 and 2016 all involved some element of controversy.

“Congress had begun to sort of slip into this practice of having at least some members against receiving votes from a state because of their disagreement about how the voting process had gone in those states,” Pildes said. “(ECRA) is designed to put that genie back in the bottle.”

Pildes added that he believes the violence in the last election cycle will also make members of Congress more hesitant to challenge results for purely political reasons.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Trump foil who served on the Select Committee on Jan. 6, told NPR he’s proud that Democrats have accepted the 2024 election results, even though the certification of Trump as a victory after all his election lies have created “a very frustrating situation.”

“I think we can take pride in the fact that despite our deep disappointment and frustration with what happened in the 2024 presidential election, we stand by the results,” Raskin said.

ECRA also clarified that for an objection to be sustained, it requires a majority in both the House and the Senate.

A clearer role for Harris

Four years ago chants of “hang Mike Pence!” called out in the Capitol, when then-President Trump told his supporters that the vice president had the power to overturn the will of the voters.

At the time, legal experts said it was not true that the vice president’s role in the certification, even under the original Election Counting Act, was purely ministerial.

But the new ECRA clarified this point further, expressly stating that the Vice President “shall be limited to exclusively performing ministerial duties” and that the VP has “no power to exclusively determine, accept, reject or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes about correct certificate for ascertaining the appointment of electors, the validity of the electors or the votes of the electors.”

The role of the vice president in the process will still constitute an extraordinary moment, as Kamala Harris will oversee the certification of the election in favor of her opponent in the race (as Al Gore did in 2001).

“Special Security Event”

The final change has nothing to do with ECRA, but will still be felt throughout the day at the Capitol: increased security.

Officials across the US government has admitted that security on the day of the Capitol riot was not commensurate with the risk of a mass violence event.

It won’t be like that this year.

In September, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the January 6 electoral vote count would be designated a “national special security event,” putting it on par with a presidential inauguration and freeing up more federal resources for security.

US Capitol Police have conducted drills with officers from 16 different agencies ahead of Jan. 6, according to WJLA in Washingtonand temporary fences have also gone up around the Capitol.