CHARLESTON — As the U.S. House of Representatives focuses on the work of the Jan. 6 Committee, U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said a bipartisan bill in the Senate will clear up the issue that caused supporters of former President Donald Trump to storm the Capitol in the first place.

Speaking to reporters from her Capitol Hill office Thursday during a virtual briefing, Capito, R-W.Va., said that the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 will be taken up by the Senate Rules Committee, where Capito serves as a committee member. Capito said she hopes the bill will pass before the next presidential elections in 2024.

“I think our best hope for getting this — once we work it through committee and have everybody else weigh in – is that I think that we could see an opportunity by the end of the year,” Capito said. “It would be nice to have it done before we turn onto the next presidential campaign.”

Capito and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., are among 16 Democratic and Republican senators who sponsored the Electoral Count Reform Act. The agreement was announced in a press release Wednesday.

“From the beginning, our bipartisan group has shared a vision of drafting legislation to fix the flaws of the archaic and ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887,” the group of senators said in a joint statement. “We have developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for President and Vice President. We urge our colleagues in both parties to support these simple, common-sense reforms.”

The Electoral Count Reform Act would require that only the governor of a state can submit one slate of electors unless otherwise directed by a state’s constitution or laws. It would create a three-judge panel to look at any issues surrounding elector slates and certification. It makes clear that the role of the vice president in certifying a presidential election is merely ceremonial with no powers to accept or reject slates of electors.

The bill raises the threshold for members of Congress to object to slates of electors from one member to one-fifth of the combined 535 House members and 100 senators. It also prohibits state legislatures from overriding the popular vote results in their state by trying to declare an election a “failed election.”

The Electoral Count Reform Act updates the Electoral Count Act of 1887, meant to prevent a circumstance similar to the presidential election of 1876 when a stalemate occurred between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. That election saw multiple slates of electors sent to Congress, taking weeks to certify the election for Hayes.

“The point of this is to clarify and get rid of any kind of ambiguity around the 1884 statute,” Capito said. “Obviously, it needs to be modernized, and that’s what we tried to do with a very narrow focus.”

While meant to clear up any confusion in how presidential results are certified, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 was at the center of a goal by former president Trump and supportive attorneys to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to throw out slates of electors from battleground states that they believe allowed fraud to take place, resulting in the election of President Joe Biden.

Pence refused to participate in the scheme, believing neither the U.S. Constitution nor the Electoral Count Act of 1887 gave him the authority to throw out slates of electors. When Congress met on Jan. 6, 2021, to certify the election, Trump directed his supporters to go to Capitol Hill in protest. Some of those supporters raided the U.S. Capitol, putting a pause on certification efforts until the protestors could be cleared from the building.

“We worked with legal and constitutional experts on both sides of the aisle to try to formulate something very narrow that made it very clear the process of disputing ballots, the process of bringing electors, and the process of having any kind of judicial review,” Capito said. “But also what the vice president’s specific role is, how many members of the Senate and the House would need to bring a question, because that right now is one person and we felt like the threshold was just too low. I think this is something that should have been done probably 30 or 40 years ago.”

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