OPINION:
I was Ohio’s secretary of state when members of Congress attempted to overturn the election results.
President George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in Ohio by about 118,000 votes. The result had already been counted and certified. As conspiracy theories grew, so did calls for Congress to reject our electoral votes.
Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio picked up the mantle and formally objected. That forced both chambers to stop and debate whether to count my state’s voters.
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They lost 74-1 in the Senate and 267-31 in the House. No one in the press called it an assault on democracy. They described it as “raising concerns.” Now that a Republican is in the White House, the story is very different.
Earlier this month, Reps. Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey Democrat, and Don Bacon, Nebraska Republican, began circulating a letter asking House members to recognize every state-certified winner of November’s elections and seat them when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3, 2027.
As Mr. Bacon told The Wall Street Journal, the goal is to “seat certified winners and preserve trust in the institution.”
Republicans will gladly sign the pledge. Adding certified winners to the clerk’s roll and seating them is required by federal law and is the constitutional duty of Congress. Conservatives have long said as much. The problem is not with the pledge; it is in the media’s coverage of it.
Much of the mainstream press coverage of the petition presents it as a way to keep Republicans from stealing the House. Journalists’ assumption is that one party may be tempted to ignore the voters, and the other needs no reminder.
That assumption is wrong, and the record shows it. The record starts in 2020. We had a national election during the height of a pandemic, which was a recipe for irregularities.
In some states, court settlements rewrote rules that state legislators never approved. Mail voting expanded faster than states could ensure every ballot was accurately processed and verified.
Americans had every right to ask questions, and they asked them through recounts, audits, legislative hearings and lawsuits. None of this constituted lawlessness. Concerned citizens simply used the channels the law provides to ensure fairness and transparency. Yet everyone knows that those channels have an endpoint.
Every claim needs evidence, and courts get the final word. Once results are certified, they are final.
I said this as a secretary of state, and I say it again now: Defending election integrity has never meant refusing to accept a loss.
However, the same rules have to apply to both parties, and Democrats have not consistently followed them.
In 2017, several House Democrats rose to object to President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral votes. In 2018, Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia governor’s race by roughly 55,000 votes. She has yet to concede — and has been celebrated for it.
The clearest example arrived after the 2020 election in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District. Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks won by six votes. Iowa recounted and certified the result. Democrat Rita Hart chose not to contest it in Iowa’s courts and instead asked the Democratic-controlled House to overturn the outcome.
House Democrats kept Ms. Hart’s challenge alive for months before public pressure forced her to withdraw. Consider what the reaction would have been had a Republican House tried to unseat a Democrat who won a certified six-vote race. We would still be hearing about it.
Ms. Hart had a legal right to file her challenge, and Republicans have the same right. What neither party has is the right to accept the system when it wins and treat it as suspect when it loses.
All the chatter about not accepting election results has focused on Republicans, but what about Democrats? Republicans could do much better than the forecasts suggest. If that happens, will the Democrats demanding these pledges honor them just as eagerly? Will they accept Republican victories in closely contested races, even in states they expected to carry?
Will they resist the temptation to question the legitimacy of an election simply because the outcome was not what they anticipated? I hope the answer is yes.
The pledge that Messrs. Gottheimer and Bacon are circulating is a good test because it binds everyone who signs it, no matter who wins. The party of law and order should sign first. Then we should hold everyone else to it.
• Ken Blackwell is a former Ohio secretary of state and chair of election integrity at the America First Policy Institute.
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