Voters voted. States counted the votes. Challenges were heard and dismissed. Now the Electoral College has made President-elect Joe Biden’s victory fully official.
The time for President Trump’s repeated unfounded allegations of fraud is over, but that doesn’t mean the drama is over. Lawmakers follow an archaic timeline with the constitution and US law to make Biden president.
Just as then Vice President Biden oversaw the counting of election votes that brought Trump to the White House in 2017, now Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s loyal soldier for the past four years, will announce the number of votes that Biden officially won. Read more about that here.
And Republicans will have to choose how deeply they want to follow Trump down his rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.
Be here important dates to watch from now until inauguration day:
23 December
- Election votes must arrive in Washington.
- The certified electoral votes have nine days to get from their state to Capitol Hill.
January 3rd
- New congress is sworn in.
- Members of Parliament and new members of the Senate take the oath of office at 12 noon. This is the official start of the 117th Congress. However, the two seats in the Georgia Senate will remain unoccupied until after a second election on January 5.
6 January
- Electoral votes counted in Congress.
- Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate meet in the House of the House of Representatives. The President of the Senate – that is Vice President Mike Pence – will chair the session and the election votes will be read in alphabetical order and counted by two appointees, each from the House and Senate. They then give their grades to Pence, who will announce the results and listen for any objections.
- If there are objections, the House and the Senate look at them separately to decide how those votes are counted.
- There are 538 electoral votes – one for each congressman and senator plus three for Washington, DC. If no candidate gets the majority – there are 270 – then the 435 members of the House will decide the election. Each state is given a vote. So while there are more Democrats in the House, Republicans control more state delegations from now on, so it’s possible the House could elect Trump even though there is a Democratic majority.
- The House has until noon on January 20 to elect the president. If they can’t, it’s the vice president or the next person eligible in the line of presidential succession.
January 20th
- Inauguration day.
- A new president takes the oath of office at noon. If the President-elect dies between Election Day and Inauguration, the Vice-President-elect takes the oath of office and becomes President. In a disputed election, if the House has not elected a president but the Senate has elected a vice president, the vice president-elect becomes acting president until the House makes a choice. And if there is no president-elect and no vice-president-elect, the House appoints a president until one is elected.