Electoral College makes it official: Biden
Despite Trump’s protestations, president-elect says America’s system of government remains intact
It began at 10 a.m. in New Hampshire, where electors met in a statehouse chamber festooned with holiday decorations and gave their four votes to Joe Biden. By noon on Monday, the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, ground zero for many of President Donald Trump’s fruitless lawsuits, had backed Biden too. In New York, Bill and Hillary Clinton voted for Biden along with 27 other electors.
And when California cast its 55 votes for Biden around 5:30 p. m. Eastern time, it pushed him past the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency, putting the official seal on his victory after weeks of efforts by Trump to use legal challenges and political pres
sure to overturn the results.
In a speech from his longtime home of Wilmington, Delaware, Biden aimed to guide Americans past the tumult of the campaign and Trump’s refusal to accept defeat.
“If anyone didn’t know it before, we know it now. What beats deep in the hearts of the American people is this: Democracy,” Biden said. “The right to be heard. To have your vote counted. To choose the leaders of this nation. To govern ourselves.”
After garnering a record of more than 81 million votes, Biden is still trying to build momentum as he prepares to assume the presidency on Jan. 20. That’s been complicated by Trump refusing to concede and has instead pursued baseless legal challenges that have been roundly rejected by judges across the political spectrum, including the justices at the Supreme Court.
Though Trump’s actions have threatened core democratic norms, including the peaceful transfer of power, Biden argued that America’s system of government remains intact.
“In America, politicians don’t take power — the people grant it to them,” Biden said. “The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know
that nothing — not even a pandemic, or an abuse of power — can extinguish that flame.”
He also pledged to be “a president for all Americans” who will “work just as hard for those of you who didn’t vote for me, as I will for those who did.”
For all of the turmoil that Trump had stirred with his conspiracy theories, lawsuits and baseless claims of fraud, the Electoral College vote that sealed Biden’s victory was mostly a staid, formal affair, devoid of drama. As it always is.
Though supporters of
Trump had promised to mount protests outside the statehouses in battlegrounds that the president had lost, Monday’s voting went largely smoothly; there were no demonstrations that disrupted the proceedings, and in some states, police officers at the scene outnumbered protesters.
The vote follows six weeks of unprecedented efforts by Trump to intervene in the electoral process and change the outcome of an election he lost by about 7 million votes. He was joined by many Republicans who supported his unfounded claims of voter fraud, including 126 party members in Congress and 18 state attorneys general who sup
ported a case before the Supreme Court that legal experts said had no merit. The court rejected the case on Friday.
One of the few places where there was any drama was Michigan, where a state representative began the day by claiming that the state Republican Party would find a way to defy the Democratic electors won by Biden, and issuing an ominous threat that he could not promise a safe day in Lansing. The Republican speaker of the house, Lee Chatfield, responded by stripping him of committee assignments, then issuing a statement forcefully rejecting pleas to appoint a separate, Trump-backed slate of electors.
“I fear we’d lose our country forever,” Chatfield said. “This truly would bring mutually assured destruction for every future election in regards to the Electoral College. And I can’t stand for that. I won’t.”
The vote Monday officially sends Biden to the White House on his third attempt at the presidency, and after a trying election marked by deep divisions and a devastating pandemic. Biden has aggressively been working to fill out his Cabinet to prepare for when he takes office in January, aiming to have a team ready to combat the coronavirus and begin the long recovery.
The vote also largely removes any cover for Repub
licans in Congress who for six weeks have largely refused to acknowledge Biden as the president- elect. In providing Trump the room to dispute his loss, staying largely silent as he peddled conspiracy theories about voting fraud, they had presented the Electoral College as the new marker for when a presidential victory should be recognized.
On Monday, some Republicans expressed what appeared to be a grudging acknowledgment that Biden had prevailed.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had enthusiastically backed Trump’s bid to reverse his loss, told CNN that he had spoken with Biden and conveyed that he would
work with him when possible. “It’s a very, very narrow path for the president,” Graham said of Trump. “I don’t see how it gets there from here, given what the Supreme Court did.”
Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri said that “Vice President Biden is the president- elect,” and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said the country would see “the page turned on Jan. 20, and we’ll have a peaceful transition.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader and the most powerful Republican in Congress, did not respond when asked by a reporter in the Capitol about Biden.