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Biden’s victory is clearly visible as Electoral College set to decide
Biden’s victory is clearly visible as Electoral College set to decide
On Monday, 50 Electors of state capitals and Washington, D.C., are gathering together to cast the formal votes electing Joe Biden president. It is one of the last steps to finalize the 2020 election process and shut off President Donald Trump’s presidential period.
Electoral are sitting together with president clarifying doubts about the legitimacy of the election and lodging baseless claims of fraud that are moving around this year after election.
That’s why electors, while excited to perform their constitutional function, are watching warily for last-ditch protests by Trump or his allies Monday. Democratic electors are working in close coordination with their state parties and therefore the Biden campaign to make sure Monday’s ceremonies run smoothly, especially in five states Biden flipped: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump allies have continued to contest the results.
For Trump, the body vote likely marks the top of his wide-ranging legal effort to stay in power. While his legal team and their allies have talked of continuous their litigation, they need also pointed to the body vote as an important and essentially irreversible milestone.
The only step that is still after Monday may be a Jan. 6 meeting of Congress to count and certify the electoral votes. Trump’s allies within the House are promising to inject some drama into that process by challenging Biden’s win in Congress, but it’ll likely amount to a filibuster, forcing a daylong debate that delays certification by a matter of hours.
The Constitution says little about how the method should work aside from that electors are to satisfy on an equivalent day across the country. Rather, each state sets its own process, often by law, to control the meeting of the electors. Most will meet in statehouses sometimes began in those laws.
Biden will officially devour the body majority on Monday afternoon, when California’s 55 electors are set to deliver their votes for him. Earlier within the day, Democratic electors in some battleground states expect protests from Trump supporters as they record their votes.
Trump insisted all weekend — even after the Supreme Court shot down the legal effort he insisted was his best shot to upend Biden’s presidency — that he’s not done fighting, and therefore the electoral meetings are subsequent milestone on the calendar.
“No, it’s not over,” he said in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday, where he repeated false claims of systemic fraud and conspiracy theories a few rigged election. The president insisted that he could prevail in local cases, though he has been trying that route for over a month without success.
The Biden campaign says it worked closely for months with state parties to make sure that only loyal supporters ended up securing the coveted elector roles, and no defections are anticipated.
Biden is about to offer a speech about the body results later Monday evening.
Before 2016, the method of appointing electors was often an afterthought for even the foremost detail-oriented presidential campaigns, with neither party paying much attention to who snagged the ceremonial spots. But after Trump’s victory in 2016, a gaggle of Democratic electors mounted a national campaign to pressure Republicans to interrupt from Trump and support a special Republican for president.
That effort fell well short, but it still resulted within the largest number of “faithless” electoral votes in history. Five Democratic electors bucked Hillary Clinton and two Republicans rejected Trump, effectively disenfranchising many voters who had cast their votes for the main candidates in those states and expected their electors to support them.
Many states have laws that punish these so-called faithless electors, often with a removal from their position or some kind of fine. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld those laws as constitutional — another bulwark against Trump’s efforts to subvert an election that he lost.
This year’s body ceremonies also are happening amid a world pandemic, with many thousands within the us sickened with coronavirus and thousands dying a day . State laws require in-person meetings to cast body votes, creating logistical challenges and requiring additional layers of coordination to make sure that the meetings themselves don’t become Covid-19 hot spots.
