Then-vice president Mike Pence reads the final certification of the Electoral College votes after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. A new law clarifies that the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is ministerial. Congress will count the votes for the 2024 presidential election on Monday.
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The biggest difference between January 6, 2025 and January 6, 2021 will be evident.
Instead of falsely claiming he won the election in a speech delivered 2 miles from the U.S. Capitol, whipping up a mob of his supporters to violently disrupt the electoral vote count, Donald Trump will be certified the winner by Congress.
This change has radically impacted all aspects of the post-election period. Election officials say their offices aren’t getting the same nasty phone calls. Surveys reveal that the majority of Americans trust the results. But there may be no greater contrast this cycle than in Monday’s debates.
“January 6 is the date, if there is a date, that we will see a peaceful transfer of power in the United States,” said Rick Pildes, an election law expert at New York University. “In many ways, this is the most important moment in democracy. … And of course, this January 6, in the background, there will be the resonances of what happened (in the aftermath of) ( elections) of 2020.”
In many ways, experts expect certification at the Capitol to return to what it was before 2020: a simple bureaucratic step that formalizes an outcome Americans have long known about.
But there will be subtle differences in this year’s debates.
In response to the chaos four years ago, Congress adopted new rules to govern and clarify the presidential certification process. After the last election, Trump’s legal team attempted to exploit the previous framework, which legal scholars widely viewed as fraught with ambiguities.
“It was very poorly written,” said Pildes, who was one of the lead attorneys advising a bipartisan group of lawmakers in crafting the update, known as the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA). “The only thing you want in a legal framework to resolve a contested election – and this is true for any election, but particularly for the presidential election – is a clear legal framework, established in advance so that it cannot be manipulated for partisan purposes at the time of the crisis.
This is the first presidential election certified under the new law, which also clarifies how states finalized their results in December. Here are some of the main changes that will affect Monday’s proceedings.
Objections need merit – and more support
Previously, it only took one member of the House and one member of the Senate to approve an election objection to send the issue to a period of debate that could last several days without a clear resolution if both chambers were then in dispute. disagreement on their position. respective votes on the objection.
The previous law also did not specify what types of questions could motivate a challenge.
The ECRA, however, significantly raises the bar on objections to 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 lawmaker can object to the results, essentially clarifying that partisan differences over election policies in a given state do not constitute a valid reason to object to the state’s results.
Even before 2020, which saw more than 100 Republican members of the House and Senate object to the results in response to Trump’s false claims, objections had begun to become more common as the 2000, 2004, and 2016 election processes involved all some element of controversy.
“Congress has begun to slide toward this practice where at least some members object to receiving votes from a state because of their disagreement with how the voting process was conducted in those states,” he said. Pildes said. “The (ECRA) is designed to put that genie back in the bottle.”
Pildes added that he thinks the violence of the last election cycle will also make members of Congress more hesitant to object to the results for purely political reasons.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Trump flagship who served on the Jan. 6 investigative select committee, told NPR he was proud that Democrats accepted the 2024 election results, even if certifying Trump as the winner after all his election lies created “a very frustrating situation.”
“I think we can be proud of the fact that despite our deep disappointment and frustration with what happened in the 2024 presidential election, we stand by the results,” Raskin said.
The ECRA also clarified that for an objection to be sustained, it requires a majority vote in the House and Senate.
A clearer role for Harris
Four years ago, chants of “hang Mike Pence!” “” rang out at the Capitol, as 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 that wasn’t true, that the vice president’s role in certification, even under the Initial Electoral Count Act, was purely ministerial.
But the new ECRA further clarified this point, explicitly stating that the vice president “shall be limited to performing ministerial functions only” and that the vice president has “no authority to determine, accept, reject, or otherwise judge or resolve disputes over the appropriate certificate of verification of elector nomination, elector validity, or elector votes.
The vice president’s role in the process will represent yet another 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”
Security fencing was installed Sunday near the U.S. Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 certification of the 2024 presidential election.
Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images
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The latest change does not affect ECRA, but will still be felt throughout the day at the Capitol: increased security.
U.S. government officials admitted that security on the day of the Capitol riot was not commensurate with the risk of a mass violent event.
This will not be the case this year.
In September, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the January 6 electoral vote count would be designated a special national security event, putting it on par with a presidential inauguration and freeing up more federal resources for the security.
The U.S. Capitol Police conducted drills with officers from 16 different agencies before Jan. 6, according to WJLA in Washington, and temporary fencing was also erected around the Capitol.
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