California certified its presidential election on Friday and named 55 voters who pledged to vote for Democrat Joe Biden, officially handing him the Electoral College majority needed to win the White House.
Formal approval by Secretary of State Alex Padilla of Biden’s victory in the state raised his count of pledged voters so far to 279, according to a tally by The Associated Press. That’s just over the 270 threshold for victory.
These steps in the election are often ignored as formalities. But the hidden mechanics of choosing a U.S. president have come under new scrutiny this year as President Donald Trump continues to deny Biden’s victory and pursues increasingly deceptive legal strategies aimed at nullifying the results. before they are finalized.
Although it has been evident for weeks that Biden won the presidential election, his accumulation of more than 270 voters is the first step toward the White House, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University.
“It’s a legal milestone and the first milestone that state has,” Foley said. “Everything before that was based on what we call projections.”
Voters named Friday will meet on December 14, along with their counterparts in each state, to formally vote for the next president. Most states have laws linking their constituents 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 committed voters would contemplate not voting for him.
The results of the Electoral College vote must be received, and generally approved, by Congress on January 6. Although lawmakers can challenge the acceptance of voters’ votes, it would be nearly impossible for Biden to be blocked at that time.
The Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate would vote separately to resolve any disputes. One has already emerged in Pennsylvania, where 75 Republican lawmakers signed a statement on Friday urging Congress to block state electoral votes from being cast for Biden. But US Republican State Senator Pat Toomey said shortly after that he would not oppose Pennsylvania’s voters list, underscoring the difficulty of trying to change the election results through Congress.
“As a practical matter, we know that Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20,” Foley said.
That became clear in the days after the election, when mail-in ballot counting gradually made it clear that Biden had won victories in enough states to win the Electoral College. It became even more apparent in late November, when each decisive state won by Biden certified him as the winner of their elections and appointed their constituents to the Electoral College. Trump has tried unsuccessfully to prevent those states from certifying Biden as the winner and appointing voters for the former vice president.
He made no effort in deeply Democratic California, the nation’s most populous state and the treasure of its largest number of electoral votes. 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.
Trump and his allies have filed at least 50 legal cases trying to overturn the results in the swing states Biden won, primarily Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. More than 30 have been rejected or eliminated, according to an AP count.
Trump and his allies have also raised the far-fetched idea that Republican state legislatures in those states could name a rival group of voters committed to Trump.
But state Republican leaders have rejected that approach, and in any case, it would likely be futile. Under federal law, both houses of Congress would have to vote to accept a competing voters list. If they don’t, the electors appointed by the state governors, all committed to Biden in these cases, should be used.
The last movement left to block the elections would be the quixotic effort to reject voters in Congress.
This tactic has been tried: a handful of Congressional Democrats in 2000, 2004, and 2016 opposed George W. Bush and Trump being officially presidents. But the numbers weren’t enough to prevent the two men from taking office.
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