The 538 Electoral College electors will gather in their respective states on Monday to cast ballots for U.S. president, the final step in the certification process before Congress finalizes the count on January 6.
Results will be tabulated, signed, sealed, and sent by registered mail to Vice President Mike Pence.
A number of states have laws that require electors to support the winner of the state’s election, while electors in other states do so in accordance with custom. President-elect Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes to President Trump’s 232.
Electoral votes must arrive in Washington by December 23. On January 3, new members of Congress are sworn in, beginning the 117th Congress — though Georgia’s two Senate seats, which will determine party control of the Senate, will remain vacant until after a January 5 runoff.
Though Trump lost both the Electoral College vote and the popular vote, and, according to the New York Times, though he and his allies have lost roughly 50 legal challenges to the presidential election in the past five weeks, the president is continuing to seek alternative pathways to stay in office. This includes pressuring congressional Republicans and state lawmakers to support his bid after failing to overturn the election results in the courts.
On January 6, Pence will preside over a meeting of members of the House and the Senate in the House chamber during which electoral votes will be read and counted in alphabetical order by two appointees each from the House and Senate. They will give their tallies to Pence, who will announce the results and listen for objections.
Trump allies in the House have been approaching GOP senators hoping to recruit one of them to join in objecting to slates of electors, sources told the Washington Post.
Should a member of the House and a member of the Senate challenge a state’s results, it would trigger a congressional vote that could force Republicans to choose between accepting the election results or supporting Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.
Representative Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) has vowed to challenge the results, though a number of unknowns remain, including how many slates of electors he and other lawmakers plan to contest and whether they can find a Senate Republican to join their effort. According to the Washington Post, House Republicans are eyeing Senators Mike Lee (R., Utah), Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Rand Paul (R., Ky.), Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), and Kelly Loeffler (R., Ga.) as potential allies in their efforts.
If there are objections, the House and Senate consider them separately to decide how to count those votes.
If neither candidate reaches the 270 electoral vote threshold needed for victory, then the 435 members of the House would step in to decide the election ahead of January 20 — Inauguration Day — with each state receiving one vote. While the House is controlled by Democrats, Republicans control more state delegations.
Brooks and Representative Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.), leader of the House Freedom Caucus, met with the Senate Republican Steering Committee leaders, including Lee and Cruz, during which Brooks and Biggs detailed their plans to trigger a vote.
Cruz on Tuesday said the courts would have the final decision on the election.
“There are multiple lawsuits raising allegations of fraud and irregularities in this election,” Cruz said. “We need to allow the judicial process to work its way through and resolve those claims.”
Trump’s legal efforts have largely fizzled out, with judges across key battleground states including Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan dismissing his claims of voter fraud over lack of standing. The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a bid by Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn Biden’s win in the state.
A small number of lawsuits are still working their way through the courts, including in Wisconsin and Georgia, though none are expected to deliver Trump a victory.
On Wednesday, Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.) sent an email to House Republicans hoping to find colleagues to sign on to an amicus brief in a last-minute Texas lawsuit looking to disallow results from Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania on Trump’s behalf.
Johnson wrote that the president “will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” a warning that Trump would be made aware of who had signed and who didn’t.
Of 196 House Republicans, 126 signed on.
“Most of my Republican colleagues in the House, and countless millions of our constituents across the country, now have serious concerns with the integrity of our election system,” Johnson said in a statement. “The purpose of our amicus brief will be to articulate this concern and express our sincere belief that the great importance of this issue merits a full and careful consideration by the court.”
Additionally, more than two dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus and other conservatives signed a separate letter to the president asking that he direct Attorney General William Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate “irregularities” in the election. Barr last week announced that the Justice Department had not yet found evidence of voter fraud that would overturn the election results.
Trump has touted a number of claims, including that mail-in ballots were improperly issued, that absentee ballots were incorrectly counted, that poll observers were not given appropriate access to the vote count, and that foreign powers had hacked into and manipulated voting machines.