Two years after Hawley’s objection, Blunt advances changes to election certification

After Sen. Josh Hawley nearly two years ago became the first senator to say he would object to certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, Missouri’s other Republican senator has succeeded in making it much more difficult for Hawley and other lawmakers to ever do it again.

Sen. Roy Blunt helped craft changes to the once-obscure Electoral Count Act of 1887 with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, designed to clear away procedural uncertainties that former Republican President Donald Trump and his allies attempted to exploit on Jan. 6, 2021, as a violent mob whipped up by Trump descended on the Capitol.

Congress approved the measure on Friday – a final legislative accomplishment for Blunt, who will leave office in early January when his term ends.

The legislation clarifies that the vice president holds only a ceremonial role in counting the electors. Trump repeatedly pressured former Vice President Mike Pence, in his role presiding over the Senate, to delay the certification. It also sets rules for how states should handle a failed election and will make it more difficult for individual lawmakers to challenge the electors of a given state.

Instead of allowing just one representative and one senator’s objection to force a vote, the new law will raise the threshold to 20% of the House and Senate.

“I think there are a couple of areas there that really need to be clarified,” Blunt said.

The legislation is among numerous provisions tucked into a 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government. The Senate approved the bill 68 to 29 on Thursday. The House passed it 225 to 201 on Friday. President Biden is expected to sign it.

Blunt voted yes and Hawley voted no. Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who also objected during the Jan. 6, 2021, certification, voted no. Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican who was reelected to another six-year term in November, was a yes.

Ahead of the vote, Hawley said he opposed the electoral count measure, saying he didn’t believe it was necessary to change the law, which he noted had been on the books for 150 years. He also said that he didn’t think the objection “caused the riot.”

“This is the democratic process,” Hawley said, echoing the speech he made from the Senate floor after he continued to object to the certification of Pennsylvania’s electors after the insurrection.

“This is the right place if there are concerns about an election … the right place to debate it is here. It’s on the floor of the Senate, the floor of the House, as opposed to another avenue like, rioting,” Hawley said.

The Electoral Count Act update comes at a moment when false conspiracy theories and beliefs about the validity of U.S. elections have taken root among some Americans. Election officials across the country have faced threats and harassment. State legislatures have sought more restrictive voting laws, under the auspices of increasing election security.

Those threats to the country’s democratic process have served as a backdrop for elections experts from both political parties as they’ve urged Congress to act. The congressional action also comes amid the release this week of the report by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

On that day, Congress was in the process of certifying the election when insurrectionists loyal to Trump broke into the Capitol, causing staffers, journalists, members of Congress and Pence to fear for their safety.

Klobuchar said that as lawmakers were hiding, waiting for the mob to be cleared from the Capitol, she and Blunt were committed to ensuring Congress would finish certifying the election that day.

“We basically stood up a front and said, no matter what we are going back, we’re going back,” Klobuchar said.

Blunt is a former county clerk and Missouri secretary of state – two local offices that are responsible for administering elections. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, told The Star that Blunt, with his experience as Missouri secretary of state, helped address the “goofy rhetoric about elections, some of it, Donald Trump claiming he somehow won the election.”

McConnell said he believed the reforms to the Electoral Count Act would address some of the loopholes in the law that Trump’s allies were trying to exploit.

“I think we have produced, in the Senate, a solution to the problem,” McConnell said. “Not a whole lot of other stuff, but a solution to the actual problem.”

The House passed a version of the reforms in September, but it stalled in the Senate, where lawmakers were attempting to craft a bill with bipartisan support.

“The Senate bill was, one it was put together in a very bipartisan way,” Blunt said. “And two, might be much less complicated and less open to other problems going down the line than the House bill.”