Confusing and ambiguous laws for critical phases of the presidential election played a big role in the near failure of America’s peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 elections. Republicans and Democrats in Congress took on the problem, passing critically important bipartisan legislation in December 2022. Now, it’s up to the states to complete this important work. Before the 2024 election, all states and Washington D.C. should assure their own laws and procedures comply with the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA).
To date only a handful of states have enacted ECRA compliance changes.
This week, Election Reformers Network (ERN) released a new report, “ Helping States Comply with the Electoral Count Reform Act, ” designed for state legislators and their staff, election officials, and other administrators. The report summarizes the impact of the ECRA on state law and provides six recommendations on what states need to look for—and potentially change.
“The Electoral Count Reform Act reflects a broad bipartisan consensus that clarity counts when the stakes are high and time is short,” said G. Michael Parsons, ERN Senior Counsel and lead author of the report. “The report aims to make implementation as simple as possible so states can carry on this important and timely work ahead of the 2024 presidential election.”
The ECRA updated the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which contained the ambiguous and outdated language that provided a pretext for attempts to subvert the 2020 election. Recognizing the importance of clarity for the processes governing a peaceful transfer of power, Congress affirmed the purely ministerial role of the vice president, tightly narrowed the grounds for objection to electoral votes in Congress, and underlined the primacy of courts in resolving election disputes. In addition, the ECRA added new procedures to avoid any ambiguity around the validity of electoral votes received from the states.
Because of these changes, there are now discrepancies between state and federal laws. “We shouldn’t be relying on eleventh-hour litigation in 2024 to fix foreseeable issues that can be addressed today,” said ERN Executive Director Kevin Johnson. “We don’t need to take that chance.”
The report’s recommendations need not always be adopted through legislation—some could be incorporated through rule-making and guidance, or even referenced by courts when determining appropriate requirements, remedies, and deadlines in particular cases.
The report will go to election officials and legislators in all 50 states. In some locations ERN will be working directly with state leaders to advance the needed changes.
The report and executive summary can be read on the ERN website, along with other election resources.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.