Affirm Biden’s victory

Electoral College set to affirm Biden’s victory

Electors in all 50 states and D.C. are meeting Monday to cast their votes in the constitutional process for picking a president.

By KYLE CHENEY and ZACH MONTELLARO

Electors in 50 state capitals and Washington, D.C., are gathering Monday to cast the formal votes electing Joe Biden president, one of the last steps to finalize the 2020 election process and close off President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.

The constitutionally mandated ritual rarely draws much notice, but the electors are meeting this year against an unusual backdrop, with the sitting president sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the election and lodging baseless claims of fraud that have been adopted, despite repeated losses in court, by a significant portion of GOP voters and officials.

That’s why electors, while excited to perform their constitutional function, are watching warily for last-ditch protests by Trump or his allies Monday. In Michigan, the state capitol formally closed legislative offices Monday, with law enforcement citing "credible threats of violence" as Biden's electors prepared to gather there in the afternoon. Michigan has been the site of intense waves of protest this year against its stringent anti-coronavirus measures, often featuring armed participants. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, was the target of an elaborate kidnapping plot foiled by law enforcement earlier this year. In other states, electors' meeting locations have been withheld from the public to maximize security.

Democratic electors are working in close coordination with their state parties and the Biden campaign to ensure Monday’s ceremonies run smoothly, especially in Michigan and the four other states Biden flipped: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump allies have continued to contest the results.

For Trump, the Electoral College vote likely marks the end of his wide-ranging legal effort to remain in power. While his legal team and their allies have talked of continuing their litigation, they have also pointed to the Electoral College vote as a crucial and essentially irreversible milestone. Over the weekend, the Trump campaign began airing television ads amplifying his fabricated claims of election fraud, urging voters to "stop the steal." Both ads were immediately removed from YouTube for violating its new policies on election-related content.

The only step that remains after Monday is a Jan. 6 meeting of Congress to count and certify the electoral votes. Trump’s allies in the House are promising to inject some drama into that process by challenging Biden’s win in Congress, but it will likely amount to a filibuster, forcing a daylong debate that delays certification by a matter of hours.

The Constitution says little about how the process should work other than that electors are to meet on the same day across the country. Rather, each state sets its own process, often by law, to govern the meeting of the electors. Most will meet in statehouses at times set out in those laws.

Biden will officially pick up the Electoral College majority on Monday afternoon, when California’s 55 electors are set to deliver their votes for him. Earlier in the day, Democratic electors in some battleground states are expecting protests from Trump supporters as they record their votes.

Trump insisted all weekend — even after the Supreme Court shot down the legal effort he insisted was his best shot to upend Biden’s presidency — that he’s not done fighting, and the electoral meetings are the next milestone on the calendar.

“No, it’s not over,” he said in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday, where he repeated false claims of systemic fraud and conspiracy theories about a rigged election. The president insisted that he could prevail in local cases, though he has been trying that route for over a month without success.

The Biden campaign says it worked closely for months with state parties to ensure that only loyal supporters ended up securing the coveted elector roles, and no defections are anticipated. Biden is set to give a speech about the Electoral College results later Monday evening.

Before 2016, the process of appointing electors was often an afterthought for even the most detail-oriented presidential campaigns, with neither party paying much attention to who snagged the ceremonial spots. But after Trump’s victory in 2016, a group of Democratic electors mounted a national campaign to pressure Republicans to break from Trump and support a different Republican for president.

That effort fell well short, but it still resulted in the largest number of “faithless” electoral votes in history. Five Democratic electors bucked Hillary Clinton and two Republicans rejected Trump, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters who had cast their votes for the major candidates in those states and expected their electors to support them.

Many states have laws that punish these so-called faithless electors, often with a removal from their position or some sort of fine. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld those laws as constitutional — another bulwark against Trump’s efforts to subvert an election that he lost.

This year’s Electoral College ceremonies are also happening amid an international pandemic, with hundreds of thousands in the United States sickened with coronavirus and thousands dying every day. State laws require in-person meetings to cast Electoral College votes, creating logistical challenges and requiring additional layers of coordination to ensure that the meetings themselves don’t become Covid-19 hot spots.