evidence: President Donald Trump tweeted this morning, "The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors." Last night Trump said at a political rally in Georgia, "I hope Mike Pence comes through for us.… If he doesn't come through, I won't like him quite as much." This is what passes for legal reasoning in the Trump White House on the day before Pence presides over the electoral count in the Senate. As I explained last week ("No, Jefferson didn’t rig the 1800 vote count"), the misguided notion that Pence enjoys any latitude to pick and choose electoral ballots derives in large part from a misreading of a 2004 law review article ("Thomas Jefferson Counts Himself into the Presidency") by David Fontana of George Washington University and Bruce Ackerman of Yale. In their article, Fontana and Ackerman raise the possibility that in 1800 Jefferson, who was then both vice president and a candidate for president, tilted the electoral count in his own favor by not throwing out Georgia’s electoral ballot, even though three congressional "tellers" charged with reviewing the ballots (two from the House and one from the Senate) had noted an irregularity in the format of that ballot. [...] Precedents established by Thomas Jefferson in 1800 would permit Pence to invalidate a particular state’s electoral returns on the grounds that the underlying vote-count was generated in an illegitimate fashion — that it was rigged.