This year’s presidential election and Donald Trump’s seemingly ceaseless challenges to its legitimacy have provided the American public with a civics lesson the likes of which we’ve never seen. The abstruse process for determining the winner of an American presidential election has never been more widely discussed and elucidated. Before this year many of us assumed that the winner of an election was determined on Election Day or shortly thereafter. We may have understood that there were subsequent technical steps required to certify the results, but few of us realized how convoluted that pathway is, let alone fully grasped all the details.
Before this year, could you have said how, where, and when the Electoral College vote is tallied? Well, this year it was front-page news. Electors met in each state’s capital yesterday to cast their ballots, and the result was as predicted when Biden was declared the winner back on November 7.
But those who have been paying attention to our nationwide civics lesson know that the process isn’t over. There’s one final step before Biden is officially designated the president-elect. That step, in which Congress certifies the Electoral College vote on January 6, could prove to be messy this time, as have all the steps that preceded it. I was grateful for this article in the New York Times, which details the procedural rules for that final step and the various ways it could play out. As the article explains, the person for whom January 6th will be the most awkward is Mike Pence. It falls to him to make the official announcement of Biden’s win.