Washington — The House and Senate will meet Monday to certify President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
This comes four years after a violent mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol to stop Congress from affirming President Biden’s victory. Democrats do not appear to have any intention of obstructing the certification of Trump’s victory.
Here’s what to expect this time.
How does Congress count presidential election results?
Senators and House members will meet in a joint session at 1 p.m. to tally the electoral votes from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Vice President Kamala Harris will assume her duties as President of the Senate.
The vice president will read the electoral votes aloud, then Congress will count the results from each state to affirm Trump’s victory. Trump won 312 Electoral College votes, far exceeding the 270 needed for victory. Harris won 226 votes.
The process is usually a ceremonial step before a president’s inauguration on January 20.
Is Congress still counting results on January 6 after the presidential elections?
The law requires Congress to count electoral votes on January 6 after each presidential election. However, the date was temporarily changed by law while January 6 fell on a weekend. In 2013, Congress claimed that President Barack Obama won the election on January 4, rather than January 6, which was a Sunday.
What is the Electoral Count Reform Act and what is different this time compared to January 6?
After the 2021 Capitol riot, Congress moved to reform the Electoral Count Act — an 1887 law that governed the counting of electoral votes — to prevent another attempt to overturn the results of a presidential election.
Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which clarifies that the vice president’s role in presiding over the joint session of Congress is ceremonial. It also made it harder for members of Congress to defy a state’s electors by raising the threshold to 20 percent of each chamber’s members. Previously, it only took one deputy and one senator to raise an objection.
After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, he and his allies fueled unfounded claims of fraud and argued that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to accept or reject electoral votes. Pence has denied having such authority.
As Congress counted votes in 2021, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, joined Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, in objecting to Mr. Biden’s votes from Arizona .
The joint session was then recessed and the House and Senate separately debated the objection. The process was abruptly interrupted when a violent crowd of protesters entered the building after Trump urged them to march to the Capitol.
Hours later, after rioters were cleared from the building, both chambers voted to reject the objection that would have thrown out Arizona’s electoral votes for Mr. Biden. The House and Senate then reconvened in a joint session to continue counting. They were then forced to split and debate another objection to Pennsylvania’s results, brought by Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Both chambers also rejected the attempt to throw out the state’s votes for Mr. Biden.
What happens if a member of Congress objects to electoral votes?
This time it will only be a complaint. In the last presidential election, a member of each chamber had to object to the count to force lawmakers to debate and vote on whether to accept or reject a state’s results. The Election Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2022, raised the threshold to one-fifth of the members of each chamber.
