# Electoral Count Act The **Electoral Count Act of 1887** was Congress's answer to the disputed election of 1876, in which three Southern states sent competing elector slates and the crisis was resolved by an ad hoc electoral commission and the Compromise of 1877. The statute tried to prevent a repeat by fixing the counting calendar, creating the optional "safe harbor" for states that resolved disputes early, and specifying how objections would be handled at the joint session. It was, by near-universal assessment, badly drafted. Its ambiguities — what "regularly given" meant, what happened when a state's determination was contested, and above all what the presiding officer's role in "counting" actually was — supplied the raw material for the 2020–21 effort to overturn the result. Those provisions were rewritten by the [[Electoral Count Reform Act]] in December 2022. See [[Electoral College Process Flow]]. This is a stub — expand with the 1876 crisis, the 1887 floor debate, and the specific textual defects the 2022 rewrite targeted. ## See Also - [[Electoral Count Reform Act]] - [[Electoral College Process Flow]] - [[Safe Harbor Deadline]] - [[Bush v. Gore]]