A bipartisan group of Senators, led by Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), released their proposal today to reform seriously flawed 19th-century laws that govern presidential elections. The laws include the Presidential Election Day Act of 1845 and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA), into which the 1845 Act was incorporated. Democracy 21 is […]
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | July 14, 2022 The House Jan. 6th Committee hearings have documented that central to the attempted presidential coup by former President Donald Trump and his chief strategist John Eastman was their plan to exploit a loophole in the Presidential Election Day Act of 1845. The loophole would have allowed a […]
If Donald Trump is nominated again in 2024, “another attempt at a Trump presidential coup is far more likely to succeed – unless flawed laws, enacted in 1845 and 1887 and still on the books today, are repaired,” Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer warns in a new op-ed published today by Just Security. While most of […]
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | February 3, 2022 Following the defeat last month of the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, essential voting rights legislation, by a vote of 52-to-48, a small bipartisan group of Senators turned their focus to repairing the Electoral Count Act of 1877 (ECA). This effort to develop ECA reforms […]
Reforms to the Electoral Count Act (ECA) are “needed and welcome, but they simply are not adequate to meet the current moment.” As Congress considers the next steps in the fight to move voting rights forward, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 230 national organizations, and 53 individual […]
WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | JANUARY 6, 2022 Today, one year after the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, our democracy faces its greatest internal threat since the Civil War. Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him may well be the most dangerous con job ever perpetrated on the American people. […]
No one should fall for the Electoral Count Act “bait & switch,” D21 President Fred Wertheimer and Norman Eisen, President Obama’s ethics czar, write. With the Senate finally scheduling action to address the national epidemic of voter suppression and election hijacking laws, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republicans have suddenly found an alternative they […]
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