Biden secures enough electors to be president
WASHINGTON: California certified its presidential election on Friday and appointed 55 electors pledged to vote for Democrat Joe Biden, officially handing him the electoral college majority needed to win the White House.
Secretary of state Alex Padilla’s formal approval of Biden’s win in the state brought his tally of pledged electors so far to 279, according to a tally by AP. That’s just over the 270 threshold for victory.
Although it’s been apparent for weeks that Biden won the presidential election, his accrual of more than 270 electors is the first step toward the White House, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. “It is a legal milestone and the first milestone that has that status,” Foley said. “Everything prior to that was premised on what we call projections.”
The electors named Friday will meet December 14, along with counterparts in each state, to formally vote for the next president. Most states have laws binding their electors to the winner of the popular vote in their state, measures that were upheld by a Supreme Court decision this year. There have been no suggestions that any of Biden’s pledged electors would contemplate not voting for him.
Results of the electoral college vote are due to be received, and typically approved, by Congress on January 6. Although lawmakers can object to accepting the electors’ votes, it would be almost impossible for Biden to be blocked at that point.
The Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would both vote separately to resolve any disputes. One already has arisen from Pennsylvania, where 75 Republican lawmakers signed a statement on Friday urging Congress to block the state’s electoral votes from being cast for Biden. But the state’s Republican US senator, Pat Toomey, said soon afterwards that he would not be objecting to Pennsylvania’s slate of electors, underscoring the difficulty in trying to change the election results through Congress. “As a practical matter, we know that Joe Biden is going to be inaugurated on January 20,” Foley said.
Trump has fruitlessly tried to stop those states from certifying Biden as the winner and appointing electors for the former vice president. Three more states won by Biden — Colorado, Hawaii and New Jersey — have not yet certified their results. When they do, Biden will have 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232.