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By Reuters 
4h ago
Michael Martina and Jarrett Renshaw
Lansing, Michigan / Wilmington, Delaware – President-elect Joe Biden delivered a fierce rebuke Monday of President Donald Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of his victory, hours after winning the state-by-state Electoral College vote that officially determines the presidency. from the United States.
“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed,” Biden said in a primetime address from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
“Now is the time to turn the page, as we have done throughout our history: unite, heal.”
Monday’s vote, typically a formality, assumed enormous importance in light of Trump’s extraordinary effort to subvert the process because of what he has falsely alleged was widespread voter fraud in the November 3 election.
California, the most populous state in the United States, placed Biden above the 270 votes needed to win the Electoral College when his 55 electors voted unanimously for him and his running mate, Kamala Harris. Biden and Harris, the first woman, the first black person and the first Asian-American to become vice president-elect, will take office on January 20.
In a roughly 13-minute speech, Biden, the former Democratic vice president, called for unity while expressing confidence that the country’s democratic institutions had held up in the face of Trump’s attempts to reverse the election result.
“The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago,” Biden said. “Now we know that not even a pandemic or an abuse of power can put out that flame.”
Biden stressed that Trump and his allies filed “dozens and dozens” of legal challenges to vote totals without success, including a lawsuit in Texas that asked the US Supreme Court to invalidate the results of four states. The court, which includes three Trump appointees, rejected the offer without dissent last week.
He also noted that his 306-232 Electoral College margin was the same as Trump’s 2016 victory, which the Republican described as a “landslide.”
Under a complicated system dating back to the 1780s, a candidate becomes president of the U.S. Not by winning the popular vote but through the Electoral College system, which allocates electoral votes to all 50 states and the District. Columbia based on Congressional representation.
In 2016, Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots. Biden won the popular vote in November by more than 7 million votes.
Voters are typically party loyal and unlikely to break ranks, and few observers expected Monday’s vote to alter the outcome of the election. With Trump’s legal challenges failing, the president’s vague hopes of clinging to power rest on persuading Congress not to certify the Electoral College vote in a special session on Jan. 6, an effort that will almost certainly fail.
Trump had also lobbied Republican lawmakers in Biden-won battlefield states like Pennsylvania and Michigan to drop vote totals and name their own competing voter lists. But lawmakers largely scrapped the idea.
“I fought hard for President Trump. Nobody wanted him to win more than I did,” Lee Chatfield, Republican Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, said in a statement. “But I also love our republic. I can’t imagine risking our norms, traditions, and institutions to pass a resolution that retroactively changes Trump’s constituents.”
Some Trump supporters had called for protests on social media and election officials had raised concerns about the potential for violence amid the president’s heated rhetoric. But Monday’s vote went smoothly, without major disruption.
In Arizona, at the start of the constituency meeting there, the state’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, said that Trump’s fraud allegations “had led to threats of violence against me, my office and those in this office today sala, “echoing the same reports of threats and intimidation in other states.
“While there will be those who are upset that their candidate did not win, it is patently anti-American and unacceptable that today’s event is anything less than an honored tradition celebrated with pride and celebration,” Hobbs said.
In Lansing, Michigan, where Trump supporters on Facebook had urged protesters to rally in front of the state Capitol, only a few turned up. Bob Ray, 66, a retired construction worker, held a sign that read, “Order a Forensic Audit,” “Save America,” and “Stop Communism.”
Voters received a police escort to and from the building. One female constituent, Marseille Allen, told MSNBC that she was wearing a bulletproof vest at the urging of family and friends.
A small group of Republicans who claimed to be constituents of his party tried to enter the Capitol building as the process began, but were denied entry by police.
They asked that a whiteboard be given to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but the officer at the door told them that he would not turn over the paperwork and that they should contact officials independently.
Trump said late last month that he would leave the White House if the Electoral College voted for Biden, but has since shown little interest in budging. On Monday, he repeated a series of unsubstantiated claims.
“Swinging states that have encountered MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD, which is all of them, CANNOT LEGALLY CERTIFY these votes as complete and correct without committing a severely punishable offense,” he wrote on Twitter.
Trump’s only tactic left is to convince Congress to reject the results in January.
Under federal law, any member of Congress can challenge a particular state’s electoral count during the January 6 session. Each house of Congress must then debate the challenge before voting by a simple majority on whether to support it.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is sure to reject any such challenge, while senior Republicans in the Senate on Monday rejected the idea of overriding the result.
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