US President-elect Joe Biden took another step closer to the White House as key states in the Electoral College system formally confirmed his November 3 election victory yesterday, effectively ending President Donald Trump’s long-shot attempt to overturn the results.
The state-by-state Electoral College votes, traditionally an afterthought, have taken on outsized significance because of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud.
Election results from November show Biden, the Democratic former vice-president, won 306 Electoral College votes – exceeding the 270 needed to win – after four tumultuous years under the Republican Trump.
Biden and running mate Kamala Harris are due to take office on January 20.
There is next to no chance that yesterday’s voting will negate Biden’s victory and, with Trump’s legal campaign to reverse the results floundering, the president’s hopes of clinging to power will rest with a meeting of the US Congress on January 6 where the odds against him are as good as insurmountable.
At 78 the oldest person to become US president, Biden was due to make a speech at 8pm ET yesterday (4am Qatar time today) about the Electoral College “and the strength and resilience of our democracy”, his transition team said in a statement.
Electoral College members in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin voted for Biden yesterday, confirming his victory in the battleground states that Trump had unsuccessfully tried to challenge in court.
Electors in Arizona, which Trump lost this year after winning there in 2016, cast the state’s 11 votes for Biden.
“While there will be those who are upset their candidate didn’t win, it is patently un-American and unacceptable that today’s event should be anything less than an honoured tradition held with pride and in celebration,” Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said at the vote.
Hobbs, a Democrat, said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud had “led to threats of violence against me, my office, and those in this room today”, echoing similar reports of threats and intimidation in other states.
Under a complicated system dating back to the 1780s, a candidate becomes US president not by winning a majority of the popular vote but through the Electoral College system, which allots electoral votes to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on the size of their population.
Electors are typically party loyalists who represent the winning candidate in their state, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, which give some of their Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who won in the state’s congressional districts.
Trump said late last month that he would leave the White House if the Electoral College voted for Biden, but has since pressed on with his unprecedented campaign to overturn his defeat, filing without success numerous lawsuits challenging state vote counts.
Yesterday, he repeated a series of unsupported claims.
“Swing States that have found massive VOTER FRAUD, which is all of them, CANNOT LEGALLY CERTIFY these votes as complete & correct without committing a severely punishable crime,” he wrote on Twitter.
Trump has called on Republican state legislators to appoint their own electors, essentially ignoring the will of the voters.
State lawmakers have largely dismissed the idea.
“I fought hard for President Trump. Nobody wanted him to win more than me,” Lee Chatfield, Republican speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, said in a statement. “But I love our republic, too. I can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump.”
Trump’s sole remaining gambit could be to persuade Congress not to certify the count on January 6.
Any attempt to block a state’s results, and thus change the overall US tally, must pass in both chambers of Congress.
Republicans would very likely fail to stop Biden taking office as planned on January 20 because Democrats control the House of Representatives and several Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory.
In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by nearly 3mn votes.
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