Michael McConell, a law professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, said there are some ambiguities within the Electoral Count Act that could be shored up. For example, there is some ambiguity in the language referring to how Congress handles competing slates of electors from a state when the law says only those that are “regularly given” shall be counted, he said.

But none of the ambiguities could be reasonably interpreted as giving the vice president the power to unilaterally overturn an election’s results, said McConell, a former federal appellate judge. He said there was no serious basis for that claim.