Senator Charles Grassley is showing support for reform of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, as former President Donald Trump has recently made claims about the process of counting Electoral College votes.

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski are leading an effort to make changes to the 19th-century law that was intended to give Congress a process by which to certify the Electoral College votes submitted by the states in a presidential election. This comes as former President Trump released a statement last week that former Vice President Mike Pence had the right to overturn the 2020 election, which Pence has rebuked. The 2020 vote count was interrupted when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, some of them chanting for Pence to be killed. The Republican National Committee recently described the January 6th attack as “legitimate political discourse.” Grassley told KCII Monday that while he has been asked multiple times about that statement he has not read it himself. Though he did not say whether he agreed with the RNC, he did voice a willingness to rewrite the Electoral Count Act, “One of the reasons that I think it ought to be rewritten, it was used against three Republican campaigns by Democrats more than it’s been used by Republicans, but that doesn’t make it the reason to change it.”

Grassley did not specify which Republican campaigns the current law worked against. Since the Democratic and Republican parties were established in the U.S., four presidents have been elected for winning the Electoral College and not the popular vote, all of them Republicans (Rutherford B. Hayes – 1876, Benjamin Harrison 1888, George W. Bush – 2000, Donald Trump – 2016.) Grassley doesn’t wish for drafted legislation on the Electoral College to expand into broader voting laws, but he hopes vagueness around the vice president’s role in certifying the count is clarified.