Voters voted. States counted votes. Challenges were heard and rejected. Now the Electoral College has made President-elect Joe Biden’s victory fully official.
The time for repeated baseless allegations of fraud by President Trump is over, but that doesn’t mean the drama is over. Legislators follow an ancient timeline set by the Constitution and U.S. law to make Biden president.
Just as then-Vice President Biden oversaw the White House vote count for Trump in 2017, it will now be Vice President Mike Pence, this loyal soldier of Trump for the past four years, who will announce the vote that officially makes Biden the winner. Read more about it here.
And Republicans will have to choose how deeply they want to follow Trump in the rabbit hole of his conspiracy theories.
Here Key dates to watch From now until the opening day:
23 December
- Electoral votes must reach Washington.
- Certified election votes have nine days to travel from their states to Capitol Hill.
3 Jan.
- The new Congress has been sworn in.
- Members of the House and new members of the Senate are sworn in in the afternoon. This is the official start of the 117th Congress. However, Georgia’s two Senate seats will remain incomplete until the January 5 runoff election.
6 January
- Counted as a voter in Congress.
- Members of the House and Senate will meet in the House Chamber. The Senate President – then Vice President Mike Pence – will chair the session and the electoral vote will be counted and counted in alphabetical order by two appointments from the House and Senate. They will then give Pence their accents, which will announce the result and hear objections.
- If there are objections, the House and Senate consider them separately to determine how to count those votes.
- Here are 8,538 electoral votes – for each congressman and senator plus three Washington D.C. If a candidate does not get a majority – that is 270 – then 435 members of the House decide the election. Every state gets a vote. So despite having more Democrats in the House, Republicans, at the present time, control more state delegations, so it is possible that the House could elect Trump even though there is a Democratic majority.
- The House has until noon on January 20 to elect a president. If they can’t, he’ll be the next person to qualify in the line of vice president or presidential succession.
Jan 20
- Opening day.
- The new president is sworn in in the afternoon. If the president-elect dies between election day and the inauguration, the vice-president is sworn in and becomes president. In a disputed election, if the House has not elected a president, but a vice president has been elected by the Senate, the vice-president-elect becomes acting president until the House is elected. And if there is no president-elect and no vice-president-elect, the House appoints the president until someone is elected.
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