CNN’s Candy Crowley and Kyra Phillips

Kyra Phillips: Candy Crowley watching I guess this peculiar piece of Americana, right Candy? We were talking earlier on the phone and you said Mr. Obama really has not been the President-Elect since November.

Candy Crowley: This makes it official. In the constitution congress has to do this, and that is count the electoral votes. Listen we all know how its going to come out, let me just take the suspense out, 365 to 173, Barack Obama wins over McCain but this is something they have to do. It looks very much, if you see that picture, it looks a lot like a state of the union address. The president pro-tem of the senate which is Dick Cheney, is supposed to preside if he is not there. We will see Senator Robert Byrd, the longest serving member of the senate. He's from West Virginia. So, it is pro-forma but it is also what makes it legal.

Kyra Phillips: And also, too, I mean, the electoral college, how many times have we had to do electoral college 101 because nobody really understood what it was, now we are looking at it, here it is in action, this is our history, this our democracy at work, so there is probably another little factor that we should probably talk about and that is that faithless elector. And, that could kind of throw a wrench into this process.

Candy Crowley: Is that the best term? I love that- faithless elector. And now we could see in fact that Dick Cheney will be there. I believe that was him going by there. So in any case, faithless electors. There haven't been much of those. But basically, that's someone that doesn't cast his electoral vote the way his state voted. In recent history the last time we saw that was in 1969 when a North Carolina Elector voted for George Wallace instead of Richard Nixon. So there was a big challenge to that and the senate and the house went into their separate places and voted on it, and in fact, that electoral vote for George Wallace was allowed to be cast. So, in order to get any more challenges from those faithless electors, you have to go back to 1877 which we all know is the Hayes/Tilden race.