(Dobbs) The Election Fix Is Still In, Even If They Fix The Electoral Count

Electoral reform? With the bipartisan overhaul we’re beginning to hear about of something called the Electoral Count Act, reform is on the horizon.

But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Because if the fix is in— and in too many Republican-led states, it already is— a stronger constitutional count in Congress will come too late in the process.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing, because the vague electoral count law dating back 135 years that has governed what happens after Americans vote needs new protections. We need new protections. We’re learning more every day about Donald Trump’s overt and covert attempts to overturn the election he lost in 2020. We don’t want to go through that again.

Even Mike Pence says so, and he was on the losing side himself.

So the law that regulates the final official electoral count needs reform. A scholar at Yale Law School calculates that in the 34 presidential elections since the Electoral Count Act took effect (in 1887), nine could have been overturned by the losing political party if it had chosen to exploit loopholes in the law. No one played at this level of “constitutional hardball” though… until now.

But reforming the process that almost came apart on January 6th, when the Trump cult in Congress actually agitated to reject several states’ verified vote tallies, won’t count for much if the fix already is in. 

And that’s exactly what we’ll be dealing with if broader election reform is left to die, because vote counts that reach Congress will come out of a system already corrupted by Trump-friendly Republicans hungry for perpetual power. A system supported by unconstitutional laws engineered last year in Republican-led states to make it harder for Democratic constituencies like minorities and the poor to vote. A system supervised by politicians who have sold their souls to the devil and thrown democratic traditions into the trash.

That’s the fix… and the fix we’re in.

To be sure, there are small signs of a shift. New Jersey’s former governor Chris Christie for example, originally a Trump toady and still a man with presidential ambitions, said the other day on a radio show, “January 6 was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week: overturn the election. He wanted the election to be overturned."

And there’s Mike Pence himself, who finally came out publicly last week with a constitutional reality: "Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election.” Of course he was one of Trump’s most obsequious apologists, but as it turns out, he did help save us from a coup. An ounce of credit to a man who has an ounce of patriotism.

Apparently though, most leaders in his party still don’t.

When we see the national Republican conference last weekend officially declaring that the deadly disorder on January 6th was “legitimate political discourse,” we’re talking real extremism. They tried to walk it back but I’ve been behind the scenes with politicians long enough to know, they didn’t choose their words casually. They chose them carefully.

People who think like that, if they lose another election, will not go gentle into that good night.

When it comes to gerrymandering the composition of congressional districts, where both sides do their best to tip the scales to their advantage, reform of the Electoral Count Act isn’t going to make a difference. I once did a documentary in which we focused on two districts. One in Chicago was gerrymandered by Democrats who combined two otherwise disconnected population centers of friendly voters by pulling a freeway into the district to connect them. The other was in Arizona, where they combined far-flung populations of like-minded voters into a majority by connecting them with the Colorado River. 

It continues to this day. In Texas’s Dallas County, in a district that Joe Biden carried by five percentage points in 2020, the map has been redrawn for 2022— moving the boundaries to put black and hispanic Democrats into other districts and replacing them with white Republicans. Biden would have lost the same district, had it already been redrawn, by 12 points.

It is because of stunts like these that the non-partisan Cook Political Report says that out of 269 congressional districts being remapped for this November’s elections, only thirteen will be competitive. As Bloomberg put it last weekend, “State legislatures have put the competitive congressional district on the endangered species list.”

Some courts are trying to counteract it. In North Carolina and Ohio, they’re throwing out maps unfairly weighted by Republicans. A court in New York will be looking at a map egregiously drawn by Democrats. But just yesterday, the United States Supreme Court, with five conservatives outvoting its three liberals joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, let stand a gerrymandered map drawn by Alabama’s Republican majority in which blacks, who make up more than a quarter of the state’s population, are a majority in only one out of the state’s seven congressional districts. 

The fix is in to favor the party that draws the maps, and right now, that party is Republican.

These are the reasons why overhauling the Electoral Count Act, while good and necessary, won’t make our elections free and fair. Especially since Donald Trump himself is still out there perverting our democracy. Referring to his failure to subvert the election he lost, he said the other day, “A great opportunity lost, but not forever.”

And the majority of his party’s officials have his back.

Make no mistake, even when Trump finally is out of the picture— and that day can’t come soon enough— the chaos he caused will be with us still. He has plenty of wannabes and copycats who have shown that if they think it’s necessary to hold onto their power, they will tell the same lies, provoke the same divisions, support the same sedition he did.

The Democratic Party— maybe with at least a modicum of moderate Republican support— has to keep trying to win at more than just electoral vote count reform. It has to keep trying to make voting accessible and available to everyone eligible. If it doesn’t, then the fix is still in, and what finally happens when vote totals are delivered to the halls of Congress won’t matter.

For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.