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California certified its presidential election on Friday and named 55 voters who pledged to vote for President-elect Biden, officially giving him the electoral college majority needed to win the White House.
Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s official endorsement of Mr Biden’s state victory brought his promised voter count 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 Trump continues to deny Mr. Biden’s victory and pursues increasingly specious legal strategies aimed at overturning the results ahead. that they are not finalized.
Although it has been evident for weeks that Mr Biden has won the presidential election, his accumulation of more than 270 voters is a key step towards the White House, said Edward B. Foley, professor of law at Ohio. State University.
“It’s a legal step and the first step 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 Mr 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 Mr 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 block state election votes for Mr. Biden. But Republican U.S. state senator Pat Toomey said shortly after that he would not oppose Pennsylvania’s voters list, pointing to the difficulty of trying to alter 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 Mr 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 Mr. Biden won declared him the winner of their elections and nominated their voters to the Electoral College. Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully to prevent those states from certifying Mr. Biden as the winner and nominating voters for the former vice president.
He made no such effort in deeply democratic California, the most populous state in the country. Three other states Mr. Biden won – Colorado, Hawaii and New Jersey – have yet to certify their results. When they do, Mr. Biden will have 306 Electoral College votes against 232 from Trump.
Mr Trump and his allies have filed at least 50 lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the results in the transition states won by Mr Biden – mainly Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. More than 30 have been rejected or abandoned, according to an AP count.
Mr. Trump and his allies have also raised the far-fetched idea that Republican state legislatures in those states could appoint a set of rival voters promised to Mr. 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. If they don’t, voters appointed by state governors – all promised to Mr Biden in these cases – must be used.
The last remaining move to block the election would be the pipe-dreaming effort 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 Mr. Trump as president. But the numbers weren’t enough to keep the two men from taking office.
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