The time for the big voters has come

Tomorrow, Monday, December 14, the large voters of the 50 US states, plus those of the District of Columbia, will meet in their respective state capitals to cast the votes of the so-called “constituency”, the judgment (not a real and proper ) that specifically elects the president of the United States. Top voters in each state will write the names of the presidential candidate and the top-rated candidate or vice presidential candidate in their state on a series of ballots, all of which will be sent to Washington, where the Senate will finally certify the winners in January. It will be Joe Biden and his future deputy Kamala Harris, of the Democratic Party, who will obtain 306 votes against the 232 of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

Last Tuesday, the deadline that in the United States is called “safe harbor” (Safe Harbor), which essentially secured Biden’s victory. Under normal conditions, his victory would have been certain already a few days after the November 3 elections, but Trump has tried by all means to avoid it through a completely unfounded media and judicial campaign aimed at overturning the will of the voters, and confirmed as such by the courts. who took care of it.

Specifically, the “safe harbor” is the date by which, if states certify their election results, they can be sure that they will not be challenged by the Senate. If a state does not certify them by that date, the Senate could – but not necessarily the case – question them, if at least two parliamentarians ask for it: to invalidate them, however, both houses of Congress must agree, and the House is controlled by the Democrats.

All states have certified their results as of Tuesday except Wisconsin, where a lawsuit filed by Trump allies is still pending. But even without Wisconsin’s top ten voters, who will likely be confirmed shortly anyway, Biden is well above the threshold of 270 voters needed to be elected to the White House.

Normally, the “safe harbor” date would have gone unnoticed, but Trump’s attempts to invalidate the election results, based on baseless allegations of fraud and wrongdoing, have made this deadline particularly long-awaited. Trump’s lawsuits were either dismissed or filed in Arizona, Georgia (where there have been two counts), Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected another one originally filed in Pennsylvania.

– Read also: “This story must end,” according to Georgia’s head of electoral processes.

There is still substantially one left in Wisconsin, where it was properly filed and will be reviewed at an initial hearing next week.

Then there was a different one from the others, presented directly to the Supreme Court by the Texas Attorney General’s Office to request the invalidation of the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, accused of compromising the regularity of the elections with the measures taken to carry out vote her during the coronavirus pandemic. US law allows certain inter-state disputes to be brought to the national Supreme Court without going through the normal judicial process, which first involves a step in the courts and state Supreme Courts. On Friday, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal.

However, as with all those presented so far, the experts considered that there was no evidence or arguments for it to be successful. Invalidating the result in four states with a single ruling was a totally implausible hypothesis, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has a solid majority of conservative justices.

On Monday, then, 538 large voters in the United States will gather to do what is effectively a broadcast of the votes cast by ordinary citizens on November 3. In fact, in the United States, technically, you do not vote for a candidate for president, but for the list of large voters linked to that candidate in your state: in some the names of the large voters are even printed on the ballot. They are elected months in advance by local parties, in different ways, and sometimes during state conventions, and are typically state MPs, local leaders, or party sponsors, and the nomination process is often a matter of favors and location.

Michigan’s big voters after the 2016 election (Sarah Rice / Getty Images).

This year there has been much debate about the possibility that the large voters chosen by the winning party can, once reunited with their colleagues, vote for another, or even for the opposition candidate for the presidency, the defeated one in their own state. It is technically possible and even has a name: “unfaithful voters.” In 2016, seven did, 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans, writing several names: but it is not plausible that they could alter the final result. Also because a Supreme Court ruling last July actually authorizes states to compel large voters to respect the will of the people, while the laws of some states authorize the substitution of non-aligned votes and in some cases also establish than voting differently is a crime.

What will happen on Monday is quite complex: the states have already sent “Certificates of Evaluation” to the National Archives in Washington indicating the winning candidate, the names of their major constituents in the state and the number of votes received. These documents will be read on Monday in the various places where the voters will meet, by an official who will lead the process (often the local secretary of state). After a few formal passages, voters cast their votes, in different ways, by marking the preloaded ballots or by writing the names of the candidates for president and vice president on a white sheet, and usually with an open ballot, which are then collected and read. aloud. .

A ballot for a major voter in the state of Michigan in the 2016 presidential election (Sarah Rice / Getty Images).

Once the result is obtained, a long series of certificates is produced in multiple copies, which are sent to the president of the Senate (that is, the vice president of the United States), the National Archives, the secretary of state and the district court. with jurisdiction over the place. where the meeting took place.