NBC News Quotes Matthew Sanderson on 2024 Election Results and Electoral Count Reform Act

Donald Trump has ramped up his baseless accusations that Democrats are plotting to “cheat” or “steal” the election, raising fears that the former president is setting the stage for an attempt to overturn the result if Vice President Kamala Harris wins. 

But any effort to derail the electoral process would run up against an array of new guardrails this time around, legal experts say, making it unlikely that any such attempt would succeed. The new protections include: an electoral law Congress passed in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, recent court rulings, more vigilance from state election officials and more aggressive law enforcement by agencies determined to avoid a repeat of violent scenes from the U.S. Capitol four years ago.

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Matthew Sanderson, an election lawyer based in Washington, D.C., said he thinks it’s extremely unlikely that that scenario would play out to its end.

“Even if Republicans win thin majorities in the new Congress seated on Jan. 3,” he said by email, “I find it incredibly hard to believe that large numbers of GOP Senators and House members who recently co-sponsored and voted for the Electoral Count Reform Act would flip in only a matter of days to pass a resolution calling it ‘unconstitutional’ prior to the Joint Session on Jan. 6.”

But even if that did happen, Sanderson said, Congress cannot just declare its previous laws “unconstitutional.”

“It has no mechanism for doing that,” he said. “Congress can only repeal its prior laws, and a joint congressional resolution would not repeal anything. On that basis, I think even a conservative Supreme Court would say that the Electoral Count Act (as reformed) would govern the process.”

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