Just as President Donald Trump misused an old law in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, many of his acolytes in Pennsylvania used an outdated state law to flood county courts with bogus litigation following the Nov. 8 midterm election.

Trump adviser John Eastman concocted the scheme to misapply the Electoral Count Act of 1887, prompting Trump to call on Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certified Electoral College results from Pennsylvania and several other states. Pence had no authority to do so, and to his credit, he refused to comply with the scheme.

Congress recently updated the Electoral Count Act to preclude its future use in the cause of insurrection.

The Pennsylvania law in question dates to 1927. It covers appropriate causes and procedures for election recounts. Following the election, which included very few close races, activists filed at least 150 lawsuits challenging results. Most did not allege any specific wrongdoing or mistakes, and courts dismissed almost all of them. But the need to process the frivolous lawsuits delayed the state’s election certification by several weeks.

The news organizations Votebeat and Spotlight PA reported recently that the 1927 recount law never has been updated.

When passed, the $50 mandatory filing fee to seek a recount was meant as a deterrent to frivolous suits, in that $50 was serious money then. Today, applying inflation since 1927, the fee would be about $860.

The Legislature should increase the mandatory fee to ensure that petitioners are, at least, serious.

And the law needs an update for other reasons. It was adopted after a Philadelphia judicial candidate received zero votes out of more than 20,000 cast in several precincts. But since then, other election laws have been changed to ensure that any election fraud is vanishingly rare.

The law allows petitions for recounts if any three voters state simply that it is their “belief” that fraud occurred. It does not require any specific allegation of wrongdoing or evidence to support the petition.

Lawmakers should update the law to require such specificity. Voters must have recourse in the courts to challenge fraud, but they are not entitled to disrupt the system for their own partisan advantage.