Google was no help on this. Does it just mean: “these are the vote totals and I swear the numbers are right”?
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It’s reporting the official score. Poll officials report, then municipal officials compile that and report, then the county / state compiles that and says “that’s the number.”
Official results can differ a little from election night estimates due to sweeping for counting and arithmetic errors, and ballot curing in some states. The news reports on Election Night are of no *legal* consequence.
It is a public proclamation by the election commission that the results have been accurately determined. This determination—counting if you will—is always done in the presence of the political parties, and usually, though not always, a neutral person or persons. This becomes the official count. It can be contested, of course; but those usually fail.
If you’re referring to what Congress does on January 6th after the Presidential election, it’s a bit of a holdover from the older days of the Electoral College.
The way the EC was originally supposed to work was that the President would be elected indirectly; each state would elect a bunch of Electors (either through popular vote or by the state legislature), and they in turn would all meet at their respective state capitals, write down all their votes, and mail it to Congress. Electors were expected to vote their conscience and select whoever they felt would be the best President. The Vice President of the US (who’s President of the US Senate) would then open all the letters and calculate totals in front of Congress. It’s called certifying the election because that was literally the first time the election’s national results would be formally tallied.
Anyway, after Washington’s presidency, that whole “Electors can vote for whoever” part didn’t last very long. Electors soon began campaigning on the promise that they’d vote for a particular Presidential candidate if elected. By the 1860s, voting for an Elector was basically voting for a Presidential candidate by proxy, and many states added “faithless elector” laws requiring Electors to vote for whichever candidate wins their state’s popular vote. Now, the Electoral College is basically just a way to weight the sum of each state’s vote.
Now you might be thinking “If the Electoral College works completely differently than intended, why not update the Constitution to reflect that?” Well, amending the Constitution is a process that requires a lot of time and political capital that most politicians don’t care nearly enough about to bother with. So, the current laws are basically retrofitted and jury-rigged to work with the wording of the Constitution.
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