Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) isn’t wasting her few final months as Wyoming’s representative. Instead, she has proposed legislation aimed at preventing “another effort to steal a presidential election.”
Cheney is accompanied by Democrat Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (Calif.) — who serves alongside Cheney on the panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection — wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal detailing a series of proposed changes to the Electoral College Act. The changes would “make it clear that Congress can’t overturn an election result.”
In the piece, Cheney and Lofgren describe how former President Donald Trump allegedly committed several crimes in his efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election and continues to “intentionally” peddle “false election fraud allegations, claiming that he should be reinstalled as president.”
The pair asserted that many of the current candidates running for office in the midterms — including those that oversee the elections — have latched onto “those lies and other groundless conspiracy theories” and could attempt to overturn future elections.
The congresswomen explain, “This raises the prospect of another effort to steal a presidential election, perhaps with another attempt to corrupt Congress’s proceeding to tally electoral votes,” as was the case on Jan. 6.
To prevent this possibility, Cheney and Lofgren suggest updating the Electoral Count Act of 1887 through “four fundamental principles.”
One significant principle clarifies the role of the Vice President, noting that he “has no authority or discretion” to reject electoral college votes or delay the count of such votes.
Before the election was certified in 2021, Trump pressured to have then-Vice President Mike Pence to assist in his efforts to overturn the election by rejecting electoral college votes.
