 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
538 members of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
The count of the Electoral College ballots during a joint session of the 119th United States Congress, pursuant to the Electoral Count Act and Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, on January 6, 2025, will be the final step to confirm president-elect Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election over Kamala Harris.
The United States Electoral College is the group of presidential electors required by the Article Two of the Constitution to form every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president. Each state appoints electors according to its legislature, equal in number to its congressional delegation (senators and representatives). Federal office holders cannot be electors. Of the current 538 electors, an absolute majority of 270 or more electoral votes is required to elect the president and vice president. [1] As stated in the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution, if no candidate for either office achieves an absolute majority there, a contingent election is held by the United States House of Representatives to elect the president, and by the United States Senate to elect the vice president; under this amendment, only the election of 1824 failed to produce a majority for president, and the election of 1836 for vice president.
Each state and the District of Columbia produces two documents to be forwarded to Congress, a certificate of ascertainment and a certificate of vote . A certificate of ascertainment is an official document that identifies the state's appointed College electors and the tally of the final popular vote count for each candidate in that state [2] in a presidential election; [3] [4] the certificate of ascertainment is submitted after an election by the governor of each state to the archivist of the United States [5] [6] and others, [7] in accordance with 3 U.S.C. §§ 6–14 [8] [9] and the Electoral Count Act. [10] [11] Within the United States' electoral system, the certificates "[represent] a crucial link between the popular vote and votes cast by electors". [12] The certificates must bear the state seal and the governor's signature. Staff from the Office of the Federal Register ensure that each certificate contains all legally required information. [13] When each state's appointed electors meet to vote (on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December), [4] they sign and record their vote on a certificate of vote, [9] [11] which are then paired with the certificate of ascertainment, which together are sent to be opened and counted by Congress. [14]
The 12th Amendment mandates Congress assemble in joint session to count the electoral votes and declare the winners of the election. [15] The Electoral Count Act, a federal law enacted in 1887, further established specific procedures for the counting of the electoral votes by the joint Congress. [16] The session is ordinarily required to take place on January 6 in the calendar year immediately following the meetings of the presidential electors. [17] Since the 20th Amendment, the newly elected joint Congress declares the winner of the election; all elections before 1936 were determined by the outgoing Congress.
A state's certificate of vote can be rejected only if both Houses of Congress, debating separately, vote to accept an objection by a majority in each House. [18] If the objection is approved by both Houses, the state's votes are not included in the count. Individual votes can also be objected to, and are also not counted. If there are no objections or all objections are overruled, the presiding officer simply includes a state's votes, as declared in the certificate of vote, in the official tally. After the certificates from all states are read and the respective votes are counted, the presiding officer simply announces the final state of the vote. This announcement concludes the joint session and formalizes the recognition of the president-elect and of the vice president-elect. [1] The senators then depart from the House chamber. The final tally is printed in the Senate and House journals.
On December 23, 2022, the 117th Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act. President Joe Biden signed it into law six days later. [19] Before this law, any senator could challenge the electoral vote; this law requires the minimum support of one-fifth of the senators to raise an objection. [20] The 2025 proceeding will be the first Electoral College vote count to which this law applies.
This will be the first time since 2001 that the sitting vice president will certify the results of a presidential election in which they were a major party nominee.
Before a presidential election, candidates must plan to ensure government continuity if they take office. In August 2024, Harris tapped Yohannes Abraham to lead her Harris presidential transition team [21] while Trump tapped Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon as co-chairs of his Trump presidential transition team. [22]
On September 11, 2024, the Department of Homeland Security designated the vote count as a National Special Security Event. [23] [24]
Before the November election, Democrats on the House Committee on Administration, which has oversight of federal election laws, planned how they would deal with a hypothetical obstruction attempt by the Republicans. [25] This concern was no longer relevant after Harris lost the election.
Some people who had volunteered as fake electors in 2020 were appointed to serve as legitimate electors for Trump should he win certain states in 2024. As of October 2024 [update] , there were six such electors in Michigan, five in Pennsylvania, two in Nevada and one in New Mexico. [26]
In the United States, the Electoral College is the group of presidential electors that is formed every four years during the presidential election for the sole purpose of voting for the president and vice president. The process is described in Article Two of the Constitution. The number of electoral votes exercised by each state is equal to that state's congressional delegation which is the number of Senators (two) plus the number of Representatives for that state. Each state appoints electors using legal procedures determined by its legislature. Federal office holders, including senators and representatives, cannot be electors. Additionally, the Twenty-third Amendment granted the federal District of Columbia three electors. A simple majority of electoral votes is required to elect the president and vice president. If no candidate achieves a majority, a contingent election is held by the House of Representatives, to elect the president, and by the Senate, to elect the vice president.
A joint session of the United States Congress is a gathering of members of the two chambers of the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Joint sessions can be held on any special occasion, but are required to be held when the president delivers a State of the Union address, when they gather to count and certify the votes of the Electoral College as the presidential election, or when they convene on the occasion of a presidential inauguration. A joint meeting is a ceremonial or formal occasion and does not perform any legislative function, and no resolution is proposed nor vote taken.
In the United States, a presidential transition is the process during which the president-elect of the United States prepares to take over the administration of the federal government of the United States from the incumbent president. Though planning for transition by a non-incumbent candidate can start at any time before a presidential election and in the days following, the transition formally starts when the General Services Administration (GSA) declares an “apparent winner” of the election, thereby releasing the funds appropriated by Congress for the transition, and continues until inauguration day, when the president-elect takes the oath of office, at which point the powers, immunities, and responsibilities of the presidency are legally transferred to the new president.
The president-elect of the United States is the candidate who has presumptively won the United States presidential election and is awaiting inauguration to become the president. There is no explicit indication in the U.S. Constitution as to when that person actually becomes president-elect, although the Twentieth Amendment uses the term "president-elect", thereby giving the term constitutional basis. It is assumed the Congressional certification of votes cast by the Electoral College of the United States – occurring after the third day of January following the swearing-in of the new Congress, per provisions of the Twelfth Amendment – unambiguously confirms the successful candidate as the official "president-elect" under the U.S. Constitution. As an unofficial term, president-elect has been used by the media since at least the latter half of the 19th century and was in use by politicians since at least the 1790s. Politicians and the media have applied the term to the projected winner, even on election night, and very few who turned out to lose have been referred to as such.
The election of the president and for vice president of the United States is an indirect election in which citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in one of the fifty U.S. states or in Washington, D.C., cast ballots not directly for those offices, but instead for members of the Electoral College. These electors then cast direct votes, known as electoral votes, for president and for vice president. The candidate who receives an absolute majority of electoral votes is then elected to that office. If no candidate receives an absolute majority of the votes for president, the House of Representatives elects the president; likewise if no one receives an absolute majority of the votes for vice president, then the Senate elects the vice president.
The 2020 United States presidential election was the 59th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The Democratic ticket of former vice president Joe Biden and the junior U.S. senator from California Kamala Harris defeated the incumbent Republican president Donald Trump, and vice president Mike Pence. The election took place against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic and related recession. The election saw the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900. Biden received more than 81 million votes, the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a U.S. presidential election.
The 1960 presidential election in Hawaii was held on November 8, 1960, as part of the 1960 United States presidential election. This was the first presidential election in which Hawaii participated; the state had been admitted to the Union just over a year earlier. The islands favored Senator John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, by a narrow margin of 115 votes, or 0.06%, after a court-ordered recount overturned an initial result favoring Vice President Richard Nixon, a Republican. The result was considered an upset, as Nixon had been thought likely to win the state's electoral votes.
The 2020 United States presidential election in Alabama took place on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states and the District of Columbia participated. Alabama voters chose nine electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Mike Pence, against Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, United States Senator Kamala Harris of California. Also on the ballot was the Libertarian nominee, psychology lecturer Jo Jorgensen and her running mate, entrepreneur and podcaster Spike Cohen. Write-in candidates were permitted without registration, and their results were not individually counted.
The 2020 United States presidential election in Arkansas took place on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Arkansas voters chose six electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote putting incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Mike Pence, against Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, United States Senator Kamala Harris of California. Also on the ballot were the nominees for the Libertarian, Green, Constitution, American Solidarity, Life and Liberty, and Socialism and Liberation parties and Independent candidates. Write-in candidates are not allowed to participate in presidential elections.
The 2020 United States presidential election in California was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. California voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican Party's nominee, incumbent President Donald Trump, and running mate Vice President Mike Pence against Democratic Party nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his running mate Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California. In the 2020 election, California had 55 electoral votes in the Electoral College, the most of any state. Biden won by a wide margin, as was expected; however, California was one of six states where Trump received a larger percentage of the two-party vote than he did in 2016. This election also marked the first time since 2004 that the Republican candidate won more than one million votes in Los Angeles County due to increased turnout.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) is a United States federal law that added to procedures set out in the Constitution of the United States for the counting of electoral votes following a presidential election. In its unamended form, it last governed at the time of the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count. The Act has since been substantially amended by the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022.
Members of the United States Republican Party have reacted differently to Republican president Donald Trump's claims about the 2020 United States presidential election, with many publicly supporting them, many remaining silent, and a few publicly denouncing them. Trump claimed to have won the election, and made many claims of election fraud. By December 11, 2020, 126 out of 196 Republican members of the House backed a lawsuit filed in the United States Supreme Court supported by nineteen Republican state attorneys general seeking to subvert the election and overturn the election results. The Trump campaign hired the Berkeley Research Group to investigate whether there had been voter fraud. The researchers found nothing, and the consultancy reported this to Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows on a conference call in the final days of the year, before the attack on the Capitol.
In the United States, a certificate of ascertainment is an official document that identifies a state's appointed electors for U.S. President and Vice President, and the final vote count for each candidate that received popular votes.
The count of the Electoral College ballots during a joint session of the 117th United States Congress, pursuant to the Electoral Count Act, on January 6–7, 2021, was the final step to confirm then President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election over President Donald Trump.
The Eastman memos, also known as the "coup memo", are documents by John Eastman, an American law professor retained by then-President Donald Trump, advancing the fringe legal theory that a U.S. Vice President has unilateral authority to reject certified state electors. This would have the effect of nullifying an election in order to produce an outcome personally desired by the Vice President, such as a result in the Vice President's own party's favor, including retaining himself as Vice President, or if the Vice President is himself the presidential candidate, then to unilaterally make himself president.
The count of the Electoral College ballots during a joint session of the 115th United States Congress, pursuant to the Electoral Count Act, on January 6, 2017, was the final step to confirm then-President-elect Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election over Hillary Clinton.
The Trump fake electors plot was a scheme to submit illegitimate certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim U.S. president Donald Trump had won the electoral college vote in certain states, following Trump's loss in the 2020 United States presidential election. After the results of the 2020 election determined Trump had lost, the scheme was devised by him, his associates, and Republican Party officials in seven states, and it formed a part of Trump and his associates' attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. The intent of the scheme was to pass the illegitimate certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By June 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement. The federal Smith special counsel investigation is investigating Trump's role in the events. According to testimony Trump was aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act.
The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 is a revision of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, adding to procedures set out in the Constitution of the United States for the counting of electoral votes following a presidential election. It also amended the Presidential Transition Act.
State of Wisconsin v. Kenneth Chesebro, et al. is a state criminal prosecution concerning the Trump fake electors plot in Wisconsin. The three defendants, Kenneth J. Chesebro,Michael A. Roman, and James R. Troupis, were lawyers and political aides to Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign involved in planning and producing fraudulent electoral vote paperwork as part of a plot to replace or nullify the official electoral votes of the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election. The three defendants are each charged with a single count of conspiracy to utter forged official documents as legitimate.
The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.
