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Although Democratic candidate Joe Biden is now President-elect Joe Biden, there are still quite a few steps left in the US electoral process. He is expected to win, but a few more things need to happen before it becomes official. Here’s what happens now and when you should.
When American citizens vote for a presidential candidate, they are actually voting for electors in their state. In most cases, those voters are committed to supporting the candidate chosen by the voters. The number of voters is equal to the number of electoral votes in each state.
December 8: This is the deadline for resolving electoral disputes at the state level. All state recount and court challenges to presidential election results must be completed by this date.
December 14thVoters vote by ballot in their respective state capitals and also in the District of Columbia, which, while the seat of government for the United States, is not actually a state. Thirty-three states and DC have party laws or regulations that require voters to vote in the same manner as the popular vote in the state. In some states, voters can even be replaced or subject to penalties if they don’t follow the line. A voter who does not vote according to who won the popular vote is known as an “unfaithful voter.” Votes for president and vice president are counted, and voters sign six “voting certificates.” The certificates, along with other official documents, are sent by certified mail to various officials, including the President of the Senate.
December 23th– Certificates must be delivered to designated officials.
January 6, 2021: the House and the Senate hold a joint session to count the electoral votes. If a ballot has received 270 or more electoral votes, the President of the Senate, currently Vice President Mike Pence, announces the results.
If none of the presidential candidates gets at least 270 electoral votes, the House can decide the election, based on the 12th amendment to the United States Constitution. If necessary, he would elect the president by majority vote. That won’t happen in 2021 – Joe Biden will easily exceed the 270 threshold.
Photograph: Paul J Richards / AFP / Getty Images
January 20, 2021: the president-elect takes office on the day of the inauguration. The outgoing president welcomes the president-elect to the White House. Then, in a ceremony traditionally attended by all living former presidents, the new president is sworn into office. This is chaired by the Chief Justice, who is currently John Roberts..
Situation in key states
Although the election has been “called” for Biden, the vote count continues. Biden leads Pennsylvania by 41,233 and in Nevada for 27,530. Those states count for 26 polling station votes among them.
It is much tighter in Georgia, which has already announced that it will conduct a recount. There, Biden has the advantage by 10,195 votes. A recount is unlikely to change the vote. Over the past 20 years in 5,778 state elections in the US, there have been 31 counts. Only three races have been canceled in that time, but in each case the final margin only shifted between 239 and 440 votes. Biden’s lead is narrow, but much higher than that.
All three are examples of states where Biden’s share of votes increased significantly as absentee ballots began to be counted after Election Day.
In Arizona, the president-elect advantage is only 18,713 of the nearly 3.3 million votes cast. Libertarian party candidate Jo Jorgensen has amassed 49,366 votes so far. If those who voted for her had chosen Donald Trump, then the state would have been in the red.
The Trump campaign said Saturday that it had filed a lawsuit in Arizona, alleging that the most populous county in the state incorrectly rejected the votes cast by some voters.
Filed in state superior court in Maricopa County, the campaign alleges that poll workers told some voters to push a button after a machine detected an “overvoting.”
The campaign said the decision ignored voters’ choices in those races, and the lawsuit suggested that those votes could be “determinative” in the outcome of the presidential race.
