Opinion | There’s a Reason Trump Could Try to Overturn the Results of the 2020 Election

Sometimes, it seems, the Senate isn’t entirely useless.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 16 senators, led by Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, released the text of a new bill intended to make it harder to overturn the results of a presidential election. A direct response to Donald Trump’s multipronged attempt to stay in power, the bill is meant to keep a future candidate for president, including a losing incumbent, from following the same playbook.

At its heart, the bill is a major revision of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which Trump and his legal team tried to exploit to create confusion over the certification of electors and the counting of electoral votes. Specifically, Trump pressured Republican state legislators in key swing states he lost to throw out votes and send false slates of electors in place of those won by Joe Biden. He then coordinated with allies in Congress to object to the counting of Biden’s electors and pushed former Vice President Mike Pence to toss out those electors and, if needed, move the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled enough state delegations to keep him in office.

The bill would address each part of the scheme. It would require states to choose electors according to the laws that existed before Election Day and prevent state legislatures from overriding the popular vote by declaring a “failed election.”