(Photo : Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
WILMINGTON, DELAWARE - DECEMBER 14: U.S. President-elect Joe Biden speaks about the Electoral College vote certification process at The Queen theater on December 14, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. On Monday, presidential electors of the Electoral College gathered in state capitals across the nation to cast their ballots for president and vice president. Their ballots will be formally counted during a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
The penultimate step in confirming the victory of President-Elect Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the November election has been done by the 538 members of the Electoral College as they cast their ballots on Monday.
The Electoral College vote that is done more than a month after Election Day votes are cast is a formality and affirms the election winner.
In Georgia, a state flipped by Biden in 2020, Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate, took the roll call of electors and announced that the state had cast its electoral votes for the Democrat representative, Joe Biden.
Abrams shared that she was pleased to announce that Joseph R. Biden has been the recipient of 16 votes from the state to be the United States president.
As other members of the Electoral College cast their votes across the country, the proceedings resembled previous elections in which the results were a foregone conclusion.
The state of California cast their 55 votes minutes after 5:30 p.m. ET, wherein after the addition of the state's votes, Biden already crossed the 270-vote threshold, which is needed to declare him the next president officially.
Despite the pressure coming from Trump and his legal team in convincing the legislatures under the Republican party and in battleground states to appoint a slate of electors who would overturn the popular vote, none obliged, CNBC reported.
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Biden is currently on track to receive his 306 votes compared to the 232 votes for Trump, which is coincidental to Trump's same margin in 2016 when he won. He had even considered the margin then as a landslide.
According to the New York Times, Trump has consistently claimed that the result is just a product of electoral fraud. However, the said outcome was all sealed on December 8, the safe harbor day deadline to resolve any ongoing disputes regarding the results.
It only left the formality of casting the electoral votes that had already been decided.
Judges from the states of Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan disagreed that fraud had played a role in deciding the winner.
Ruling after the ruling, the legal team of Trump suffered stinging rebukes from judges, wherein the majority of them was appointed by the president himself, who either found no evidence of fraud or took the said issue with the idea that the judiciary would simply toss out enough votes to keep Trump in office for his supposed second-term.
On Friday, 18 Republican attorneys general made a last-ditch effort in asking the Supreme Court to throw out the votes in four states, which were won by Biden. However, the court turned it down decisively, the USA Today reported.
Biden of the Democratic party had planned to address the nation on Monday night. It was reported that he would emphasize that the integrity of the elections remain intact.
"And so, now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal," Biden supposedly will say, according to speech excerpts released by the transition.
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