Biden officially has enough electors to become president
California certified its presidential election Friday and appointed 55 electors pledged to vote forDemocrat 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 The Associated Press. That’s just over the 270threshold for victory.
These steps in the election are often ignored formalities. But the hidden mechanics of electing a U.S. president have drawn 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 they are finalized.
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 elect ors named Friday will meet Dec. 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 thatwere upheld by a SupremeCourt decision this year. There have been no suggestions that any of Biden’s pledged electorswould contemplate not voting for him.
Results of the Electoral College vote are due to be received, and typically approved, by Congress on Jan. 6. Although lawmakers can object to accepting the electors’ votes, it would be almost impossible for Biden to be blocked at that point.
TheDemocratic-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 Friday urging Congress to block the state’s electoral votes from being cast for Biden. But the state’s RepublicanU.S. senator, Pat Toomey, said soon afterward 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 knowthat Joe Biden is going to be inaugurated on Jan. 20,” Foley said.
Thatwas clear in the days after the election, when the count ofmail ballots gradually made clear that Biden hadwon victories in enough states to win the Electoral College. Itbecameevenmore apparent in late November, when every swing statewon by Biden certified him as the winner of its elections and appointed his electors to the ElectoralCollege. Trumphas fruitlessly tried to stop those states fromcertifying Biden as the winner and appointing electors for the former vice president.
He made no effort in deeply Democratic California, the most populous state in the nation and the trove of its largest number of electoral votes.