April 04, 2022

Senators Manchin, Collins Welcome New Input From Group of Election Experts and Legal Scholars

The prestigious and ideologically diverse group, convened by The American Law Institute, issued several general principles today that they believe should guide ECA reform

Washington, DC — U.S. Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Susan Collins (R-ME), the co-leads of the bipartisan Senate effort to reform the Electoral Count Act (ECA) of 1887, today welcomed new input from a group of election experts and legal scholars convened by the American Law Institute.

“As we continue our bipartisan effort to reform the flaws in the archaic Electoral Count Act of 1887, we very much welcome the input of this prestigious and ideologically diverse group of legal scholars and election experts, many of whom have served in Democratic and Republican administrations,” Senators Manchin and Collins said in a joint statement. “This group shares our commitment to focus on correcting the deep and serious structural problems in our system of counting and certifying ballots for President and Vice President, and we are pleased to note that many of the areas the American Law Institute members have selected parallel our group’s efforts.”

The ALI-convened group includes: Bob Bauer (NYU School of Law and former White House Counsel); Elise C. Boddie (Rutgers Law School, and former litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund); Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and formerly a Justice of the California Supreme Court); Courtney Simmons Elwood (former General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency); Jack Goldsmith (Harvard Law School and former Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel) (Co-Chair); Larry Kramer (President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and former Dean of Stanford Law School); Don McGahn (Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, and former White House Counsel); Michael B. Mukasey (former United States District Court Judge and former United States Attorney General); Saikrishna Prakash (University of Virginia School of Law); and David Strauss (University of Chicago Law School).

In addition to the input from this group, Senators Collins and Manchin are also consulting another group of legal scholars.