Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger and I am joined by John Fortier

from the American Enterprise Institute where he is a senior fellow and Matthew Seligman,

a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.

And we are going to be talking electoral countertact.

Everything you ever wanted to know, the past, the future, the present, all of it,

the different versions that have now passed the House and the Senate,

where they are stronger, weaker, what's likely to come out, but first,

we're going to start with how we got here.

Let's dive right in. John, berry basics.

Why does the Electoral Counteract happen in the first place?

Well, they're a complicated set of actors in the Constitution in resolving our presidential elections.

Some people would call it the Electoral College process.

We have voting in the states. We have resolution of elections.

We have these people called presidential electors, they vote in December.

And then Congress comes in in January 6th and counts the votes.

And some of that is laid out in the Constitution in a very general and not always particularly clear way.

And over the years, we've had controversies at times.

And if you didn't like the last election, the worst we've ever had is 1876.

I think that is one that really got us almost to the end of the process without a president.

And that had all sorts of troubles coming out of the Civil War,

where there are essentially almost two governments in some southern states appointing different states of electors.

And this incredible clash after that, although not right after that,

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