Regardless of what some people say to the contrary, Mike Pence had no power to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. That said, did he let a prime opportunity go to waste? According to 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, he did. Though he agrees that Pence had no choice but to certify the 2020 election results, Ramaswamy argues that Pence should have used the opportunity to pass election reforms.
“I would have done it very differently,” he told Chuck Todd on Meet The Press on Sunday. “I think that there was a historic opportunity that he missed, to reunite this country in that window.”
“What I would have said is: This is a moment for a true national consensus where there’s two elements of what’s required for a functioning democracy in America,” said Ramaswamy. “One is secure elections, and the second is a peaceful transfer of power. When those things come into conflict, that’s an opportunity for heroism.”
He then argued that Pence should have pushed reforms through Congress before the election results were certified.
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“Here’s what I would have said: ‘We need single-day voting on Election Day, we need paper ballots and we need government-issued ID matching the voter file.’ And if we achieve that, then we have achieved victory and we should not have any further complaint about election integrity. I would have driven it through the Senate,” Ramaswamy said. “In my capacity as President of the Senate, I would have led through that level of reform, then on that condition certified the election results, served it up to the president — President Trump — then to sign that into law. And on January 7th, declared the re-election campaign pursuant to a free and fair election,” he said. “I think that was a missed opportunity.”
On the surface, it sounds like a great concept, but under scrutiny, it falls apart rather quickly. While these reforms would help secure our elections and increase confidence in the results, the big problem with Ramaswamy’s idea is that Democrats had control of the House of Representatives at the time, and they would never have passed reforms to make elections more secure. Democrats consistently have opposed these reforms in the past, and, upon Biden taking office with both Houses of Congress in Democrat hands, they tried to codify the exact opposite. Everything that made the 2020 susceptible to fraud would have been enshrined into federal law, had they gotten their way.
Election integrity is important, and we must do what we can to ensure that both sides can feel confident an election is fair regardless of the result. But let’s not pretend that anything Pence could have said back in January 2021 would have made these reforms happen. It will take solid Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress and a Republican president to secure our elections.
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