Electoral College affirms Biden’s victory

California, the nation’s largest state with a slate of 55 Democratic electors, put Biden above the Electoral College threshold to win the presidency later on Monday.

In some states Trump lost, his would-be electors gathered in unofficial ceremonies that they said were necessary to preserve Trump’s ability to continue legal challenges against the election results. But as the official votes were recorded Monday, the finality of Biden’s victory had set in — and Biden himself offered remarks intended to turn the page on the Trump-led tumult of recent weeks.

“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed,” Biden will say in a prime-time speech, according to remarks circulated by his campaign. “We the people voted. Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact. And so, now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal.”

Unlike four years ago, when five Democratic electors broke from Hillary Clinton and two from Trump, the electors remained faithful to their party’s nominee, with Biden on track to earn his full complement of 306 electoral votes, while Trump got 232, as expected.

The final step in Biden’s ascension to the White House is a Jan. 6 joint session of Congress, at which the electoral votes will be counted and certified. Some House Republicans have signaled their intent to lodge formal challenges, but they are likely to amount to little more than a show of protest that will cause a delay of a few hours. House Democrats lodged similar challenges in 2001, 2005 and 2017, losing all of them.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) told POLITICO earlier in the month that he intends to challenge some states’ electoral counts, and other House Republicans have said they’d join him.

However, any challenge to a state would also need a senator to sign on, something none have publicly committed to so far. But even if a challenge is successfully lodged, it would almost assuredly fail in both chambers of Congress, with Democrats narrowly in control of the House and several Republican senators already congratulating Biden as president-elect and rejecting Trump’s election conspiracy theories.

Though electors began the day watching warily for last-ditch protests by Trump or his allies Monday, the only hint of drama appeared in Michigan, where 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. A GOP state representative, Gary Eisen, told a radio interviewer Monday morning that the Michigan Republican Party was planning some kind of “hail Mary” to override Biden’s victory that would “be all over the news later.” He declined to explicitly rule out violence, a comment that led state GOP legislative leaders to strip him of his committee posts.

“Our feelings, our desires, and our disappointments are subordinate to the health of our democracy and the will of the majority,” Michigan Senate GOP leader Mike Shirkey said in a statement.

But in Michigan, the ceremony went off without interruption, and The Detroit News reported only a small crowd of protesters gathered, even as the group of would-be electors for Trump asked to be let into the building.

Michigan has been the site of intense waves of protest this year against the state’s 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 were withheld from the public to maximize security. But things went smoothly, starting in Vermont, where Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received their first three electoral votes.

“Not my first rodeo,” Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos said after the 10-minute ceremony concluded.

Nevada’s electors met via Zoom, where electors held up signed copies of their formal votes for Biden to the camera. And in Georgia, Stacey Abrams presided over a drama-free meeting that unanimously backed Biden and Harris.

“I hope you can see my smiling behind this mask,” Pennsylvania Democratic Party chair Nancy Mills said after she and the state’s other electors finalized ballots for Biden.

Trump’s electors in Florida ran into a last-minute issue when one, Senate President Wilton Simpson, indicated he tested positive for Covid-19 the night before. His withdrawal will likely trigger a process to select an alternate Trump elector to complete the slate.

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. On Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court shot down yet another Trump campaign lawsuit, describing one allegation of misconduct as “meritless on its face” and others as simply lodged too late to be considered.

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

Stephen Miller, a top aide to the president, said Monday on Fox News that “an alternate slate of electors” in the battleground states Trump lost will still vote, “and we are going to send those results up to Congress.”

Miller claimed that doing so will ensure “all our legal remedies remain open,” even though the states in question have appointed electors for Biden based on their certified election results. Miller said either state legislatures or Congress could accept the Trump electors. However, there’s likely no valid pathway for Congress to consider the Trump campaign’s preferred slate.

While some would-be Trump electors cast themselves as loyal foot soldiers in Trump’s efforts to undermine the results, others still said they were doing it as merely a procedural step. Laws and rules contemplating dueling slates of electors have relied on those alternative slates being endorsed by either a state legislature, governor or other election authority, and no state officials have formally backed Trump’s alternative electors.

“We took this procedural vote to preserve any legal claims that may be presented going forward,” Bernie Comfort, the chair of the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, said in a statement circulated by the state party. “This was in no way an effort to usurp or contest the will of the Pennsylvania voters.”

The Constitution says little about how the Electoral College 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.

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.