Although his legal team has had little success in challenging the results of the vote in multiple battleground states, the official recording of the electoral college ballots across the US will effectively lower the curtain on these long-shot judicial manoeuvres. That does not mean the Trump team is giving up, of course.
It is holding alternative electoral college proceedings with an alternate set of votes that will declare the president the real winner. They will continue with futile court challenges and, eventually, ask Congress to overturn the election results. It is an alternative reality that Donald Trump's supporters may find more comforting than the one where Joe Biden is president-elect.
Given that the House of Representatives is controlled by Democrats, the official electoral college tally will have been duly certified by the states on Monday and federal law is on Mr Biden's side. Mr Trump's chances of success in the real world, however, sit squarely at zero. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Electoral college affirms Joe Biden as president-elect.
Can Trump still challenge the result? Where does the Republican Party go after Trump? The president of the United States is not chosen directly by voters, but by what's known as the electoral college. Who are the electors? Can you explain the electoral college in 10 seconds?
The process of nominating electors varies by state and by party, but is generally done one of two ways. For example, in , Trump beat Clinton in Florida by a margin of just 2.
Biden could face the same hurdle in November, meaning he will need to focus his attention on a handful of battleground states to win the presidency. While the number of electoral votes a state is assigned somewhat reflects its population, the minimum of three votes per state means that the relative value of electoral votes varies across America.
The least populous states like North and South Dakota and the smaller states of New England are overrepresented because of the required minimum of three electoral votes. Meanwhile, the states with the most people — California, Texas and Florida — are underrepresented in the electoral college.
This means that each electoral vote in California represents over three times as many people as one in Wyoming. These disparities are repeated across the country. Experts have warned that, after returning two presidents that got fewer votes than their opponents since , the electoral college is flawed. In , Al Gore won over half a million more votes than Bush, yet Bush became president after winning Florida by just votes.
In all, the US has had five presidents who lost the overall popular vote but won the election. Why hold an election if we do not care who received the most votes?
They are more likely to occur in states that are closely divided between the parties. Under the winner-takes-all system, the margin of victory in a state becomes irrelevant. As candidates easily win the electoral votes of their solid states, the election plays out in a handful of key battlegrounds. In , Trump won six such states - Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — adding 99 electoral votes to his total.
The demographics of these states differ from the national average. Florida is the only one of the four most populous states to certify. Deadlines are early next month for the others: California, Texas and New York. All states must certify before the Electoral College meets on Dec. Vote certification at the local and state level is typically a ministerial task that gets little notice, occurring after local election officials have conducted audits to ensure their vote tallies are accurate.
That changed this year with Trump's refusal to concede and his unprecedented attempts to overturn the results of the election through a fusillade of legal challenges and attempts to manipulate the certification process in battleground states he lost. Biden won by wide margins in both the Electoral College and popular vote, where he received nearly 80 million votes, a record.
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