WASHINGTON (AP) – The Electoral College has decisively confirmed Joe Biden as the nation’s next president, ratifying his November victory in an authoritarian state-by-state repudiation of President Donald Trump’s refusal to grant Lost.
Presidential voters on Monday gave Biden a solid majority of 306 electoral votes against Trump’s 232, the same margin Trump boasted was a defeat when he won the White House four years ago.
Security was increasing in some states as voters gathered to cast ballots, with masks, social distancing and other pandemic precautions on the agenda. The results will be sent to Washington and counted at a joint January 6 session of Congress, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence.
For all the allegations of fraud without Trump’s support, there was little suspense and no change, as all the electoral votes assigned to Biden and the president in last month’s popular vote were officially earmarked for each man. On election day, the Democrat led the incumbent Republican by more than $ 7 million in the popular vote across the country.
California’s 55 electoral votes place Biden above. Vermont, with 3 votes, was the first state to report. Hawaii, with 4 votes, was the last.
“Once again in America, the rule of law, our Constitution and the will of the people have prevailed. Our democracy, driven, tested, threatened, proved resilient, true and strong, “Biden said in a speech in the evening in which he highlighted the size of his victory and the record 81 million people who voted for him.
He renewed his campaign promise to be president of all Americans, whether they voted for him or not, and said the country has a hard job ahead of it on the virus and the economy.
But there were no concessions from the White House, where Trump has continued to file allegations of unsupported fraud.
Trump remained in the oval office long after the sun set in Washington, calling on allies and fellow Republicans as he followed the balance sheet of the Electoral College executive, according to the White House and campaign aides. The president often sank into the Oval Office’s private dining room to watch it on television, complaining that cable networks treated him like a mini-election night while not giving time to his challenges.
The president had become increasingly disappointed with the size of “Stop the Steal” rallies across the country, as well as efforts to get the Republican Party to present its own voter lists to states. The presidential desire for a fierce defense of the administration led Stephen Miller, one of its fiercest advocates, to appear on television on Monday afternoon to try to downplay the importance of the Electoral College vote and suggest that the challenges Trump’s lawsuits would continue until the day of the inauguration. on January 20th.
Late in the day, he took to Twitter to announce that Attorney General William Barr was leaving the administration before Christmas. Barr’s departure comes amid lingering tension over Trump’s unsupported fraud claims, especially after Barr’s statement this month to The Associated Press that the election results were not affected by any fraud.
In a Fox News Channel interview recorded over the weekend, Trump said that “I am concerned that the country has an illegitimate president, that is why I am concerned. A president who lost and lost badly.”
On Monday, in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the six battlefields that Biden won and Trump contested, voters gave Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris their votes in discreet processes. Nevada voters met via Zoom due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump’s efforts to undermine election results also raised concerns about voter safety, virtually unheard of in previous years. In Michigan, lawmakers on both sides reported that they had received threats and legislative offices were closed for threats of violence. Biden won the state by 154,000 votes, or 2.8 percentage points, over Trump.
Georgia state police were in place at the Atlanta State Capitol before Democratic voters committed to Biden met. No protesters were seen.
Even with the confirmation of the Electoral College of Biden’s victory, some Republicans continued to refuse to acknowledge this reality. Still, his opposition to Biden had no practical effect on the election process, as the Democrat will swear next month.
Republicans who would have been elected by Trump gathered anyway in a handful of states that Biden won. Pennsylvania Republicans said they cast a “procedural vote” for Trump and Pence in case courts that have repeatedly rejected challenges to Biden’s victory still determine that Trump had won.
In North Carolina, Utah and other states across the country where Trump won, his constituents turned out to vote for him properly. Voters in North Carolina were checked for temperature before being allowed to enter the Capitol to vote. Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes retired as a Trump voter and was in quarantine because he was exposed to someone with COVID-19.
Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom Trump defeated four years ago, were among the 29 New York voters for Biden and Harris.
In New Hampshire, before all four state voters voted for Biden at Concord State House, 13-year-old Brayden Harrington led the group in the Loyalty Commitment. In August, he delivered an emotional speech at the Democratic National Convention on the Fight against Stuttering that he shares with Biden.
After weeks of Republican judicial challenges that judges easily dismissed, Trump and Republican allies tried to persuade the Supreme Court last week to set aside 62 election votes for Biden in four states, which could have called into question the result.
The judges rejected the effort Friday.
The Electoral College was the product of the compromise during the drafting of the Constitution between those who favored the election of the president by popular vote and those who opposed giving the people the power to directly elect their leader.
Each state gets a number of voters equal to its total number of seats in Congress: two senators plus the number of members the state has in the House of Representatives. Washington, DC, has three votes, under a constitutional amendment that was ratified in 1961. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, states grant all of their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote of their state.
The negotiation reached by the country’s founders has resulted in five elections in which the president did not win the popular vote. Trump was the most recent example in 2016.
___
Associated Press writer Jonathan Lemire and U.S. AP writers contributed to this report.