Co-sponsored with Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren, the legislation would direct challenges to state elections to courts and limit the vice-president’s role in electoral vote-counting as “ministerial”.

That grew out of Trump’s attempt to pressure his vice-president, Mike Pence, to take action as the Senate’s presiding officer during the counting of the Electoral College results to obstruct or delay formal certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

It also would raise the bar to challenge a state’s electors to one-third of both the House and Senate.

Currently, if one member of Congress from each chamber objects to a presidential election during the arcane certification process, the chambers have to debate and hold a vote on the objection, as was done in 2021.

The bill is broadly similar to legislation being written by a bipartisan group of senators that is expected to be voted on during the lame-duck session between the November midterm election and the end of the year. Both bills would limit the kind of manoeuvres used by Trump and his allies to overturn his loss in 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol as Congress certified the Electoral College vote.

Cheney, of Wyoming, and Lofgren, of California, are members of the House committee that has been investigating the January 6 2020 insurrection at the US Capitol.

Cheney, who lost the Wyoming Republican primary in August to an election denier, has been among the most prominent GOP critics of Trump’s attempts to undermine the election.

In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, she and Lofgren wrote that the bill would ensure that “self-interested politicians cannot steal from the people the guarantee that our government derives its power from the consent of the governed”.