Now it’ll be official.
Nearly six weeks after Election Day, electors in all 50 states and Washington D.C. were poised Monday to officially seal President-elect Joe Biden’s win even as President Trump keeps complaining that he should get four more years.
Biden won states awarding 306 electoral votes, giving him a comfortable margin above the 270 needed to win the White House.
The Democratic president-elect plans to address the nation Monday evening, likely to again call for unity as he prepares to take office on Jan. 20 amid the backdrop of the raging COVID-19 pandemic and a punishing economic downturn.
Trump showed no signs of throwing in the towel, even after a long string of failed court challenges to the count that shows him losing by more than seven million in the popular vote.
“They waited to find out how many ballots they had to produce in order to steal the Rigged Election.” Trump raged Monday on Twitter.
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court sealed Trump’s defeat last week by swatting away a legal Hail Mary suit by Texas that claimed other states improperly changed their rules to allow too many voters to cast absentee ballots.
The somewhat quaint ritual prescribed by the nation’s founding fathers will unfold at noon.
From Albany to Austin and everywhere in between, a hodgepodge of politicos and grandees will gather in capitals to cast votes for the winner of the presidential election in their states.
In New York, the 29 electors include Gov. Cuomo as well as former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Each state gets a number of votes corresponding to the size of its congressional delegation, including members of the House of Representatives and two senators each. D.C. gets three votes under a constitutional amendment ratifies in 1961.
All the states except two award their electoral votes in a single group to the winner of the presidential election in the state. Maine and Nebraska give a consolation prize of electors to the winners of each of their congressional districts.
Trump toyed with pushing state legislatures in some swing states into override the results and elect their own rump slate of pro-Trump electors. But that idea, which would have faced near certain defeat in court, fizzled.
There are no touch screens or mail-in voting to worry about this time. The ballots are cast the old-fashioned way: with paper and pen.
The votes from each state are then transmitted to Congress, which officially proclaims a winner on Jan. 6, two weeks before Inauguration Day.
