Electoral college: key states confirm Joe Biden’s victory in presidential election

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Joe Biden took another step closer to the White House as key states in the electoral college system formally confirmed his election victory on Monday, effectively ending Donald Trump’s long-shot attempt to overturn the results.

The state-by-state votes, traditionally an afterthought, have taken on outsized significance because of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud.

Election results from November show Biden won 306 electoral college votes, exceeding the 270 needed to win, after four tumultuous years under Trump. The president-elect and running mate Kamala Harris are due to take office on 20 January.

There is next to no chance Monday’s voting will negate Biden’s victory and with Trump’s legal campaign floundering, the president’s hopes rest with a special meeting of Congress on 6 January, where the odds against him are as good as insurmountable.

At 78 the oldest person to become US president, Biden was due to make a speech at 8pm on Monday about the electoral college “and the strength and resilience of our democracy”, his transition team said.

Electoral college members in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted for Biden on Monday, confirming his victories in battleground states Trump challenged in court. Electors in Arizona, which Trump lost after winning in 2016, cast the state’s votes for Biden.

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“While there will be those who are upset their candidate didn’t win, it is patently un-American and unacceptable that today’s event should be anything less than an honored tradition held with pride and in celebration,” the Arizona secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, said.

The Democrat said Trump’s claims of voter fraud had “led to threats of violence against me, my office and those in this room today”, echoing similar reports of threats and intimidation in other states.

A group of Trump supporters called on Facebook for protests all day outside the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan. But by early afternoon only a handful had gathered.

Under a complicated system dating back to the 1780s, a candidate becomes US president not by winning a majority of the popular vote but through the electoral college, which allots votes to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on population.

Electors are typically party loyalists who represent the winning candidate in their state, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, which give some of their electoral college votes to the candidate who won in the state’s congressional districts.

While there are sometimes “rogue” electors who vote for someone other than the winner of their state’s popular vote, the vast majority rubber-stamp the results, and officials did not expect anything different on Monday.

Trump said late last month he would leave the White House if the electoral college voted for Biden, but has since pressed on with his unprecedented campaign to overturn his defeat, filing numerous lawsuits challenging state vote counts. On Monday, he repeated a series of unsupported claims of electoral fraud.

He has also called on Republican legislators to appoint their own electors, essentially ignoring the will of the voters. State lawmakers have largely dismissed the idea.

“I fought hard for President Trump. Nobody wanted him to win more than me,” Lee Chatfield, the Republican speaker of the Michigan house of representatives, said in a statement. “But I love our republic, too. I can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump.”

Once the electoral college vote is complete, Trump’s sole remaining gambit would be to persuade Congress not to certify the count on 6 January. Any attempt to block a state’s results must pass both chambers of Congress that day. Democrats control the House of Representatives and several Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory.

In 2016, Trump won the electoral college despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3m votes. The formal vote saw some Democrats call for electors to “go rogue” against Trump. In the end, seven broke ranks, an unusually high number but still far too few to sway the outcome.