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California certified its presidential election on Friday and named 55 voters who pledged to vote for Democrat Joe Biden, officially giving him the electoral college majority needed to win the White House.
Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s formal approval of Biden’s victory in the state has brought his promised voter count so far to 279, according to an Associated Press tally. It’s just above the threshold of 270 for the win.
These stages of the election are often ignored formalities. But the hidden mechanics of electing a US president have sparked new scrutiny this year as President Donald Trump continues to deny Biden’s victory and pursues increasingly specious legal strategies aimed at overturning the results before he is ‘they are not finalized.
Although it has been evident for weeks that Biden won the presidential election, his build-up of over 270 voters is the first step towards the White House, said Edward B. Foley, professor of law at Ohio State University. .
“It’s a legal milestone and the first milestone that has that status,” Foley said. “Everything before that was based on what we call projections.”
Voters nominated on Friday will meet on December 14, along with their counterparts from each state, to officially vote for the next president. Most states have laws binding their voters to the winner of the popular vote in their state, measures that were upheld by a Supreme Court ruling this year. There has been no suggestion that any of Biden’s promised voters would consider not voting for him.
The results of the Electoral College vote must be received, and generally approved, by Congress on January 6. While lawmakers may object to accepting voters’ votes, it would be nearly impossible for Biden to be blocked at this point.
The Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate would both vote separately to resolve any differences. One has already been born in Pennsylvania, where 75 Republican lawmakers on Friday signed a statement urging Congress to prevent state election votes from being cast for Biden. But Republican U.S. state senator Pat Toomey said soon after that he would not oppose Pennsylvania’s voters list, pointing to the difficulty of trying to change election results through of Congress.
“In practice, we know that Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20,” Foley said.
This was clear in the days after the election, when the count of the postal ballots gradually showed that Biden had won victories in enough states to win the Electoral College. This became even more evident at the end of November, when every transitional state Biden won declared him the winner of their elections and nominated their voters to the Electoral College. Trump has tried unsuccessfully to prevent those states from certifying Biden as the winner and nominating voters for the former vice president.
He made no effort in deeply democratic California, the most populous state in the country and the treasury of its largest number of electoral votes. Three other states Biden won – Colorado, Hawaii, and New Jersey – have yet to certify their results. When they do, Biden will have 306 Electoral College votes versus Trump’s 232.
Trump and his allies have filed at least 50 lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the results in swing states won by Biden – primarily Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. More than 30 have been rejected or abandoned, according to an AP count.
Trump and his allies have also raised the far-fetched notion that Republican state legislatures in those states could name a set of rival voters promised to Trump.
But Republican state leaders have rejected this approach, and it would likely be futile either way. Under federal law, both houses of Congress would have to vote to accept a list of competing voters. Otherwise, voters appointed by state governors – all promised to Biden in these cases – must be used.
The last remaining move to block the election would be the pipe dream to vote against voters in Congress.
This tactic has been tried – a handful of Congressional Democrats in 2000, 2004 and 2016 opposed the formal nomination of George W. Bush and Trump as president. But the numbers were not enough to prevent the two men from taking office.
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