This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 20th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The fights over voting rights, securing elections and other reforms are leaving out, at least

for now, the reform of the process that has led to so much confusion

and arguably played a role in that capital riot about a year ago the Electoral Count Act.

Cato's Walter Olson details how it might be fixed and why it ought to be a bipartisan fix.

What was the controversy that led to the creation of the Electoral Count Act to begin with?

The Tilden-Hays election was one of the low points really of

19th century American politics and it resulted in a tremendously confusing and hard fought post-election battle in which, for example,

states sent multiple delegations claiming to represent the State, voting for different presidential

candidates to Washington. And it was resolved, unsatisfactory ways which are beside the point for this purpose, but it was resolved through compromise, but it lingered the feeling that the system had simply not produced reliable answers, the system had failed.

And something like 10 years later, Congress got it together to try to respond with the Electoral Counter Act which laid out in rambling and confusing terms

what should happen in the future if Congress is faced with the sorts of challenges like multiple

slights of electors being reported from the same state, disputes as to whether or not

a state is properly one of the states at the Union. A lot of things that we think may be purely

academic but which could conceivably come up, not just in the circumstances of

reconstruction after the Civil War, but in case of disputes over who the proper official is in a state to send the report of its electoral votes, What do you do in case of an allegedly

disqualified candidate like someone who is not 35 years old or an instance

where the president and vice president-elect are from the same estate in violation of the

Constitution.

So they passed this law.

It did not come under very much strain simply because it was sufficiently clear in most later presidential elections

...