I wasn't following the other thread, so forgive the request for clarification, but:
One rep and one Senator say 'i object' and the election results are voided? I understood that a vote could only go to the floor if the electoral college could not arrive at a majority or other stopgame.
There are two different situations that apply.
The first is what happens if there is some sort of dispute about whether or not a state's electoral votes are valid. In 1876, some states sent in two different sets of electoral votes. (I can't do the story justice here. For more details, look up the election of 1876 in Wikipedia.) In 1887, some people in Congress decided there ought to be laws in place to cover how to proceed in the event that ever happened again. They passed the Electoral Count Act in 1887, a law that is still in place today, and it covers the "I object" case.
If the electoral votes are read, Senators or Representatives may object to some vote or votes. If one Representative and one Senator objects, then each house goes off and votes. If both houses of Congress vote to sustain that objection, that vote is not included in the total of electoral votes. The vote is done in the "regular" way, i.e. each congressman gets one vote. Majority wins. That's all from the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
The objection can't be any old objection. If the state only submits one set of votes, Congress has to take it. However, there are specific rules that must be followed in submitting votes, and the congresscritters can say that those rules weren't followed, and that the states didn't "really" submit any votes at all, because they didn't follow proper processes.
When all of that objecting is over, and all the votes have been taken, the Congress counts the remaining electoral votes.
Now, the other case kicks in, which is in the twelfth amendment of the Constitution. If no candidate has a majority, the top three go to the House or Representatives, where each state's delegation is polled, and the state gets one vote, and whoever has the most votes becomes President.....and there's some fine print in there about some edge cases. The Senate could end up involved.
So, there really is a process where if one party held a majority in both houses of Congress, they could object to enough electoral votes to either change the outcome, because their candidate has a majority of the remaining votes, or throw it to the House of Representatives for the one vote per state process, because no candidate has a majority.
You might ask why I say, "either", because if there are only two candidates is it the majority of the remaining votes (i.e. after subtracting the votes with sustained objections), or is it the majority of the original 538. The answer is that no one knows. The law is kind of vague on a couple of points, and none of this has ever been tested in court. Congress has never sustained an objection to accepting electoral votes from a state since the law was passed. Such objections have been made, but not sustained.
One thing that comes up sometimes is the fear that the Congress will declare that the election is disputed, so we go straight to the one vote per state process in the Constitution. That is not the case. The one vote per state process only happens on completion of the electoral vote count. It doesn't go to the House just because there's a dispute. You have to count the votes in order for it to go to the House.
Confusing? Yes. I think we need a constitutional amendment to upgrade the process from the 18th century process described in the Constitution, and the 19th century objection procedure, but such a thing is not likely to happen.
