claim: “Congress has one job here: to count electoral votes that have in fact been cast by any state.”
evidence: Each state has as many electoral votes as it has senators and representatives combined (or, in the case of the District of Columbia, as many as it would have if it were a state). There are 538 in total, with 270 votes needed to win. As the Congressional Research Service puts it, the electors "tend to be a mixture of state and local elected officials, party activists, local and state celebrities, and ordinary citizens." [...] Each state is supposed to submit one set of electoral votes to Congress, and that’s what usually happens. Following the disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, in which three states submitted two conflicting sets of returns, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act to try to set rules in case such a thing ever happened again. Under that law, if two conflicting sets are submitted – say, one by a Republican-run legislature and one by a Democratic governor – and the House and Senate cannot agree on which set is the legitimate one, then the electoral votes certified by the state’s governor are supposed to prevail. (Even stranger things are possible: In 1960, Hawaii’s governor first certified Vice President Richard Nixon’s electors, but after a recount certified Sen. John F. Kennedy’s electors. Both slates of electors met and voted for their pledged candidate; when the time came for Congress to decide which slate was the legitimate one, Nixon voluntarily deferred to Kennedy.)