The Constitution ultimately vests in Congress the authority to resolve challenges regarding the counting of electoral votes by the individual states in presidential elections. Yet if the 2016 presidential election melts down or if there are major challenges to the electoral votes in any state, don’t necessarily count on Congress to be able to resolve the problem. The reason is that the law that empowers Congress to resolve electoral vote disputes may be unconstitutional.
Given the recent comments that Donald Trump has made about not necessarily accepting the results of the election, or that a disagreement about the election in some state emerges again as it did in Florida in 2000, it is possible that Congress may be called on to resolve any electoral vote disputes. This would not be the first time Congress had to do that.
Congress did it the first time in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr supposedly ran as a president-vice-president ticket, but a flaw in the Constitution led them to receive an equal number of electoral votes, thereby forcing the House of Representatives to select the president and to eventually amend the Constitution.
Then there was the election of 1876 between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden received the most popular votes, but the House of Representatives eventually picked Hayes as the president after disputed elections occurred in Florida, South Carolina, and Oregon.
With no other method to turn to, Congress established a partisan Electoral Commission to award an Electoral College majority to Hayes, and agonized over the creation of a procedural framework for resolving disputed elections for a decade — finally passing the Electoral Count Act in 1887...
Read more:
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/303703-dont-count-on-congress-to-settle-a-close-us
