The Electoral College Will Pull Through for Biden, but the Damage Has Been Done
By: Andrea González-Ramírez
Tags: Politics, Electoral College, Elections, Democracy, Voting

The Electoral College Will Pull Through for Biden, but the Damage Has Been Done

There’s no telling how successful the next power-hungry incumbent will be in taking advantage of Trump’s groundwork

Supporters of President Trump walk and pray around the Pennsylvania State Capitol. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Donald Trump and his allies have spent the past six weeks hell-bent on ignoring reality, but electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia are set to reaffirm once again on Monday that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.

Six weeks after the 2020 general election, democracy has kept chugging on unencumbered. The procedural move marks the end to any chance Trump had of pursuing a legal recourse to overturn the results of the election. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit that baselessly claimed voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan. A previous attempt to get GOP-controlled state legislatures to refuse to seat Democratic electors and instead appoint Trump loyalists also failed.

Once the Electoral College votes are cast, the results will go on to Congress to be counted and officially declare a winner. And though some Republican lawmakers are likely to raise objections to the votes during the joint session on January 6 in an attempt to prevent Biden from becoming president, they won’t be able to stop the process. To consider any objection, it needs to be raised by both a representative and a senator. Then, the House and Senate need to adjourn, debate its merits, and sustain the objection before throwing out an individual elector’s vote. No Electoral College votes have been thrown out since the 19th century, and the Democrat-controlled House won’t break that precedent this year.

Trump knows how this all ends, yet refuses to concede in any way. “No, it’s not over,” he told Fox News on Sunday, peddling the same conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election he’s been spouting for over a month. Whether he truly believes his own lies or not is beside the point. His choice to delegitimize the election results — a choice enabled and aided by his own party — has caused long-lasting damage to the democratic process. The electoral process, as with all of our institutions, is rooted in people’s trust in the system. By casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election, as well as attempting to deploy executive, judicial, and legislative power to revert the results, Trump has crossed a line that we won’t be able to walk back as a country. “Once people decide that the rules are different, the rules are different,” sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in The Atlantic. “The rules for electoral legitimacy have been under sustained assault, and they’re changing right before our eyes.”

Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud also have literally put lives at risk. He has fueled the flames of anger in his base, railing about how electors were “committing a severely punishable crime” by casting a vote for Biden. This, of course, is not true. But thanks to his aspersions and coddling of armed right-wing extremists, states like Michigan and Arizona have had to take additional safety measures to protect electors, including police escorts and having them cast their votes at an undisclosed location. On Saturday, a Washington, D.C. march by the Proud Boys, a far-right group, to protest the results of the election ended in violence.

None of this will prevent Biden from becoming president come January 20. The constitutional ritual will work exactly as it was designed to do: as a safeguard against a tyrannical incumbent who would stop at nothing to keep power. But the floodgates have been opened, and there’s no telling how successful the next power-hungry incumbent will be in taking advantage of Trump’s groundwork.