Rep. Jamie RaskinCertified

Election Legitimacy (26/30)

Raskin’s public record on accepting certified election outcomes is largely strong but not spotless. He served as lead impeachment manager prosecuting Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection aimed at overturning the certified 2020 results, and sat on the bipartisan House Select Committee investigating that attack, where he pushed to bring witnesses like Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, and Ginni Thomas before the panel to expose the “effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election” ( “I don’t want to overstate her role,” he said of Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “We’ve talked to more than 1,000 people. But we’d like to hear from Gingrich and we’d like to hear from her too.” ). On the four-year anniversary of January 6, after Democrats lost the 2024 presidential race, Raskin publicly praised his own party for certifying Trump’s win, stating in an official release that “We can feel pride that the Democrats acted as constitutional patriots and certified the winner in the Electoral College… There are no election deniers, no insurrectionists and no coup-plotters on our side of the aisle.”

That said, the record is not entirely clean. In October 2024, Axios reported that Raskin refused to commit to supporting the certification of the presidential election when Congress meets on Jan. 6, 2025, to count the electoral votes if Trump is the winner , though he clarified that if Trump “won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it,” while voicing distrust that Trump would act through fair means. He also has a history of formally objecting to a certified result: in January 2017, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland rose to object to 10 of Florida’s 29 electoral votes during certification of Trump’s 2016 win, part of a Congressional Progressive Caucus protest that raskin.house.gov itself described as Congressional Progressive Caucus members interrupt certification of electoral votes to raise concerns about voter suppression rather than a claim the vote count or winner was illegitimate. This is meaningfully different from evidence-free fraud claims about an outcome, but it is still a formal objection to a certified result, which combined with his 2024 hedging keeps this from a perfect score.

Voting Rights (24/25)

Raskin has a consistently strong legislative record on ballot access and election administration. He has been a cosponsor of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in both the 117th and 119th Congresses, and current Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Raskin helped reintroduce the bill, saying “At a time of escalating racism and democratic backsliding, America must summon the moral compass of Congressman John Lewis… we reintroduce the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to protect the right to vote and strengthen our democracy” . He is also a lead sponsor, with Rep. Don Beyer, of a new Ranked Choice Voting Act intended to expand ballot options, and secured passage of his “Shareholders United” campaign-finance amendment as part of the H.R. 1 democracy reform package. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling that only Congress can enforce the 14th Amendment’s insurrection disqualification clause, a leading House Democrat is preparing legislation in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling… “Congress will have to try and act,” per Raskin. This is a substantive, sustained legislative record on expanding and protecting voting access.

Checks and Balances (25/25)

This is Raskin’s strongest category. He was the lead House impeachment manager in Trump’s second Senate trial over the January 6 attack, and NPR noted the nine House Democrats are expected to rely on lawmakers’ personal experiences during the riots to build the case against Trump. The team is led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland . As Ranking Member first of the Oversight Committee and now the Judiciary Committee, he has repeatedly pressed for executive-branch accountability, including forcing a committee vote to subpoena officials over Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” and joint oversight statements pressing the administration on transparency obligations such as the Epstein Files Transparency Act. On judicial independence, he introduced the Judicial Ethics Enforcement Act, which would empower a newly-created Office of the Inspector General to investigate alleged ethical violations by Supreme Court justices , and joined colleagues pressing Chief Justice Roberts for accountability after the Court’s ethics code drew criticism. He has also led hearings specifically on preserving an independent judiciary. This body of work across two Congresses reflects a sustained institutional commitment to oversight and separation of powers, applied to administrations of both parties.

Conduct in Office (20/20)

No nonpartisan finding — from the House Ethics Committee, an Inspector General, or the GAO — was found against Raskin. He has faced ethics complaints over his wife’s stock-disclosure timing, but these were filed by explicitly partisan advocacy organizations, the Center for Renewing America and the American Accountability Foundation, not by a nonpartisan ethics body; one such filing explicitly respectfully requests that the Office of Congressional Ethics (“OCE”) open an investigation into Representative Jamie Raskin in connection with possible violations of federal financial disclosure laws — a request for investigation, not a finding. Per the rubric, opposition-group complaints without a nonpartisan finding do not warrant a deduction, so Raskin receives full marks here.

Bipartisan Cooperation (3/10, bonus)

Raskin has a real record of bipartisan legislating, but it is concentrated outside the democracy/elections space — for example, he partnered with Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) on suicide-prevention legislation and on protecting pensions for uniformed public-health and NOAA officers, and led a bipartisan group including Reps. Greg Steube, Jimmy Panetta, and Jim McGovern on tax relief for scam and disaster victims. These reflect a general capacity to work across the aisle, but this research did not surface comparable bipartisan cooperation specifically on election administration, voting rights, or oversight/checks-and-balances legislation, which is the rubric’s focus. Given the bonus nature of this category and the absence of clear democracy-specific bipartisan wins, a modest score is warranted.