Seeking to prevent another January 6th, 2021-style shitshow from happening on January 6th, 2025, Democrats in Congress are looking to make some updates to remove the ambiguity from the Electoral Count Act of 1887, itself a clarification of Article II Section 1 of the Constitution, the New York Times reports. Whether such a change would garner enough support from Senate Republicans to cross the 60 vote threshold for passage is uncertain, though the Times reports there is wide bipartisan support from a coalition of state and local lawmakers pushing for an update.

The Trump Regime attempted to exploit ambiguities in the language of the Electoral Count Act and Article II Section 1 with ultranationalist Claremont Institute lawyer John Eastman’s now-infamous coup memo detailing how then-Vice President Mike Pence could have derailed the count by selecting Trump’s alternate slate of electors from states Biden won in the 2020 election.

Eastman relied on his own warped interpretation of the Article II Section 1 “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted” where he believed gives the Vice President unilateral authority to decide which Electoral Votes should be counted, allowing him to skip those from Arizona and six other unspecified states (we’re guessing the other six are Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and either Minnesota or Nebraska), before using either state legislatures or the House itself to throw the election for Trump. This of course is complete horseshit.

The word “counted” there is a bad choice of phrasing and unfortunately our language provides both active and passive usage of the verb. Eastman believes “counted” means an active enumeration, as in “I counted all the change I found under the couch, it was $1.53″ where in the real world “shall be counted” is meant as a passive increase in scored quantity resultant from another action. “When the quarterback completes the pass to the receiver in the end zone, the referee blows the whistle and raises his arms, signaling the catch was good, the touchdown shall be counted toward the offense team’s score” is how it should be read. The count here means the quantity is increased by the affirmation its validity by the referees and the review booth. That’s it. He’s not judging a karaoke contest or a gymnastics competition, he’s filing out a scorebook, play-by-play as it happened. That this insanely convoluted and still probably incomprehensible explanation is necessary should serve as a solid argument for Congress to clarify the process.