Welcome to Beg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I'm

Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by two of our

regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal and

Damon Linker of the week. Linda Chavez is off this week but Tim Miller of the Bullwork is sitting in for her, and

our special guest this week is Greg Sergeant, a columnist at the Washington Post.

Welcome all. There is a tremendous amount of news popping and I want to assure

our listeners that we will get to the abortion situation. It wasn't really much of a decision exactly. I will get to that

in due course but not today. I wanted Greg Sergeant to join us and I'm so glad he could because he wrote a piece about the

Electoral Count Act which is a drum that I've been beating also and we've discussed on this

podcast. You know the Democrats have made a lot of

noise about voting rights since the 2020 election and that's fine but I'm concerned some of us are concerned that it pays

insufficient attention to the dangers that lurk from attempts to screw up not the casting of ballots

so much as the counting of ballots.

So Greg Sergeant, thanks for joining us. Tell us about the

proposed reforms to the Electoral Count Act and I know it gets a little into the

weeds but do your best to lay out some of the dangers with the existing

law which was passed in 1887.

Okay, well it certainly is a complicated topic and thanks for having me on by the way and I really appreciate all you've done on the ECA too. I just want to say that

We're you know there aren't many of us out there pushing this but I hope that changes and I think it's starting to change

So the simplest way I think I know how to put this is to say that the ECA creates a set of processes to count the

electors in Congress. And the way the law is drafted is incredibly confusing and opaque and actually doesn't give us clear

guidance about how certain scenarios and certain disputes over the electoral count would be resolved.

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