The President of The Senate Pence took his\your stance and verified it with the Parliamentarian
The ascertainment was changed to incorporate the Parliamentarian opinion - note the bolded part
After ascertaining that the certificates are regular in form and authentic, the tellers will announce the votes cast by the electors for each State, beginning with Alabama, which the Parliamentarian has advised me is the only certificate of vote from that State, and purports to be a return from the State, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of that State purporting to appoint or ascertain electors.
is what Pence added to he ascertainment statement.
There was no way "papers purported..." were going to presented, much less opened. How does that square with the "papers purported" statement int he law ?
Congress is reworking the electoral count act and will be getting rid of the "purported" statement altogether.
I'm done. I'll let it alone.
Ignore the parts of the law not liked.
Just shoot me !
The law in question evolved out of the 1876 election. When competing slates of electors came from southern states under military occupation, Congress was required to make a choice as to which slate was valid. While southern states cast their popular votes for Tilden, the carpetbagger legislatures argued that there had been fraud due to disenfranchisement and terrorism of black voters and also the usual ballot box stuffing in which Democrats had excelled since the days of Aaron Burr at Tammany Hall. The legislatures sent their own electoral slate for Hayes to Congress.
Under existing law, Congress had to decide which slate of disputed electors to accept. One course was to refuse to accept any electors at all and throw the election into the House. That’s what Tilden wanted, i.e., to stick to the Constitution. The Republican Congress went outside the Constitution to appoint a committee of seven – 4 Republicans and 3 Democrats – to decide which slate to accept as legitimate and send to Congress. By a vote of four to three, the committee sent to Congress a slate of Republican electors for each disputed slate.
The Supreme Court eventually ruled on the legitimacy of a legislature having final authority in such a dispute. The Court ruled that the explicit language of the Constitution gave state legislatures final authority, even to the extent of voiding the state’s popular vote. In fact, the states didn’t even have to hold popular elections for president.
The 1887 law grew out of that conflict and the Court’s decision.
The key is, what is the legal standard for a document to purport to be an official document assigning electoral votes? Imagine what would have happened in 2000 if a group of Florida Democrats had gathered around a coffee table in a living room and decided to send a letter to the Archivist of the United States assigning Florida’s electoral votes to the Gore/Lieberman ticket due to fraud or simple miscounting. The Parliamentarian appears to have understood the standards.
