Reform the Electoral Count Act

Recent admissions from an insider about former President Donald Trump’s challenge to last year’s election results should impel lawmakers of both parties to revise the convoluted Electoral Count Act that governed the proceedings.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, wrote in a memoir that he and Trump strategist Steve Bannon had a plan to halt Congress’s certification of election results last Jan. 6 — a plan that actually was hurt, he said, not helped, by the riot that engulfed the U.S. Capitol. The idea was to exploit loopholes in the Electoral Count Act to ramp up pressure on Vice President Mike Pence, while giving Pence a flimsy excuse to reject results from six states.