US Elections: Biden Certified Pennsylvannia Winner

Democrat Joe Biden was certified on Tuesday as the winner of the Pennsylvania presidential election, which culminated a three-week vote count and a series of failed legal challenges by President Donald Trump.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf first revealed in a tweet that the State Department had certified the counting of votes for president and vice president.

Wolf sent a “verification certificate” to the national archivist Washington with the list of voters supporting President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris.

Pennsylvania’s 20 voters – a mix of elected Democrats, party activists and other staunch Biden supporters – will gather at the state Capitol on December 14.

One of them, the chair of the state Democratic Party, Nancy Patton Mills, said she will also lead the Electoral College meeting in Harrisburg next month.

Patton Mills said she was pleased that Pennsylvania was “the state that made it possible” for Biden to win.

Biden’s victory in the state, giving him his spoils of 20 electoral votes, put him above the 270 needed and led the Associated Press to declare him president-elect four days after Election Day. Biden has garnered 306 electoral votes in total to Trump’s 232.

The results from Pennsylvania show Biden and Harris with 3.46 million votes, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence with 3.38 million, and libertarian Jo Jorgensen with 79,000.

There was no immediate response from Trump, whose Twitter account had recently joined his own Republican party with a post from actor Randy Quade, claiming the election results were flawed.

Democratic Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, in a press release, called the state’s election officials and poll workers “the true heroes of our democracy.”

“We are tremendously grateful to the 67 counties who have worked extremely long hours to ensure that the vote of every qualified voter is safely counted,” said Boockvar.

Trump made Pennsylvania a centerpiece of his failed legal attempts to invalidate election results, launching legal attacks on the county’s vote counting rules and election procedures.

On Saturday, a federal judge dealt a severe blow to the Trump campaign’s legal efforts by dismissing a lawsuit that it said lacked evidence and offered “tense legal arguments without merit and speculative allegations.”

The federal government on Monday recognized Biden as the “apparent winner” of the national presidential race. -AP