States Certifying Results Before Electoral College Meeting

States began certifying their November 3 presidential election results in the run-up to the Electoral College meeting in mid-December.

Among the states that certified on Monday was Michigan, where President Donald Trump and his allies tried unsuccessfully to delay the process. The vote for a bipartisan state canvassing board in Michigan comes days after certification in Georgia, another hotly contested presidential battleground. Both states and their 16 electoral votes went to Biden.

A total of 16 states have so far certified their results, giving President-elect Joe Biden 54 of his 306 Electoral College votes and Trump 73 of his 232 votes. Florida is the only one of the four most populous states to certify. Deadlines are early next month for the others: California, Texas and New York.

All states must certify before the Electoral College meeting on December 14, and any disputes over the results must be resolved by December 8.

Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and the District of Columbia, all won by Biden, are expected to certify on Tuesday, along with Indiana and North Carolina, which went to Trump.

Certifying votes at the local and state level is usually a ministerial task that receives little notice, after local election officials have performed audits to ensure their vote count is accurate.

That changed this year with Trump’s refusal to concede and his unprecedented attempts to overturn the election results through a shootout of legal challenges and attempts to manipulate the certification process in the battlefield states he lost.

Biden won by wide margins in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, where he received a record nearly 80 million votes.