Biden called the results of the vote of the US Electoral College a clear victory.
California cast its 55 votes for Mr. Biden around 5:30 p.m. Eastern time, it pushed him past the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency, putting the official seal on his victory after weeks of efforts by Mr. Trump to use legal challenges and political pressure to overturn the results.
With the Electoral College vote behind him, Mr. Biden called for unity while forcefully denouncing the president and his allies for their assault on the nation’s voting system. In an address in Wilmington, Del., on Monday night, he said the Republican efforts to get the Supreme Court to undo the result represented a “position so extreme we’ve never seen it before,” and called the attacks on election officials at the local level “unconscionable”.
“It’s official, folks. Tune in as I deliver remarks on today’s electoral college vote certification and the strength and resilience of our democracy,” this is what Biden wrote on Twitter.
For all of the turmoil that Mr. Trump had stirred with his conspiracy theories, lawsuits and baseless claims of fraud, the Electoral College vote that sealed Mr. Biden’s victory was mostly a staid, formal affair, devoid of drama. As it always is.
Though supporters of Mr. Trump had promised to mount protests outside the statehouses in battlegrounds that the president had lost, Monday’s voting went largely smoothly; there were no demonstrations that disrupted the proceedings, and in some states, police presence outnumbered protesters.
“I am forever impressed by the fact that 5.7 million people helped our campaign win,” Biden also wrote on Twitter.
“306 votes are the same as Trump and current US Vice President Michael Pence received when they won in 2016. Then Trump called the results of the Electoral College a significant victory. By his own standards, these figures looked like a clear victory then, and I I respectfully suggest that they be considered as such even now, “the Democrat said.
The vote follows six weeks of unprecedented efforts by Mr. Trump to intervene in the electoral process and change the outcome of an election he lost by about seven million votes. He was joined by many Republicans who supported his unfounded claims of voter fraud, including 126 party members and 18 state attorneys’ general who supported a case before the Supreme Court that legal experts said had no merit. The court rejected the case on Friday.
One of the few places where there was any drama was Michigan, where a state representative began the day by claiming that the state Republican Party would find a way to defy the Democratic electors won by Mr. Biden, and issuing an ominous threat that he could not promise a safe day in Lansing. The Republican speaker of the house, Lee Chatfield, responded by stripping him of committee assignments, then issuing a statement forcefully rejecting pleas to appoint a separate, Trump-backed slate of electors.
The vote on Monday officially sends Mr. Biden to the White House on his third attempt at the presidency, and after a trying election marked by deep divisions and a devastating pandemic. Mr. Biden has aggressively been working to fill out his cabinet to prepare for when he takes office in January, aiming to have a team ready to combat the coronavirus and begin the long recovery.
The vote also largely removes any cover for Republicans in Congress who for six weeks have largely refused to acknowledge Mr. Biden as the president-elect. In providing Mr. Trump the room to dispute his loss, staying largely silent as he peddled conspiracy theories about voting fraud, they had presented the Electoral College as the new marker for when a presidential victory should be recognized.
On Monday, some Republicans expressed what appeared to be a grudging acknowledgment that Mr. Biden had prevailed. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had enthusiastically backed Mr. Trump’s bid to reverse his loss, told CNN that he had spoken with Mr. Biden and conveyed that he would work with him when possible. “It’s a very, very narrow path for the president,” Mr. Graham said of Mr. Trump. “I don’t see how it gets there from here, given what the Supreme Court did.”
Speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning, the senior White House adviser Stephen Miller said, “An alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote, and we’re going to send those results to Congress.” He said that those slates would “ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open.”
Republicans in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan followed the White House’s lead, making or discussing moves to form their own competing slates of pro-Trump electors — a theatrical effort that has no legal pathway. Electoral College slates are tied to the winner of the popular vote, and for 2020 they are now formally certified.
