Electoral College certifies Biden’s election victory as pressure mounts on Trump to concede

It’s officially over for President Trump.

Legislators convened in state capitols across the country on Monday to certify Joe Biden’s election victory in the Electoral College — a formality that few Americans usually pay attention to, but one that gained major importance this year because of Trump’s unprecedented refusal to admit defeat.

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris formally cracked the 270 Electoral College vote threshold needed to take the White House when they were awarded California’s 55 electors shortly before 5:30 p.m.

After all votes were counted, Biden was crowned the winner of the election with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 — with no change to the tally projected after the Democrat was designated president-elect on Nov. 7.

President-elect Joe Biden speaks after the Electoral College formally elected him as president, Monday, Dec. 14, at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. (Patrick Semansky/)

In evening remarks from his transition team headquarters in Delaware, Biden said this year’s chaotic presidential contest proved that democracy “beats deep in the hearts of the American people.”

“The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago, and we now know that nothing — not even a pandemic, or an abuse of power — can extinguish that flame,” Biden said, taking a stinging swipe at Trump’s desperate bid to subvert the election results.

Dec. 15, 2020: America voted. The Supreme Court ruled. Now, Electoral College affirms Biden's win over conspiracy-mad prez.

“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed.”

The last step in the long, winding road toward Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration comes in the form of a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, when lawmakers will count the Electoral College votes with Vice President Mike Pence presiding.

Even though the congressional count is a mere rubber stamp formality, no concession came from Trump after the Electoral College certification.

In fact, the outgoing president kept pressing his debunked and baseless case that Biden’s victory was the product of a “rigged” election facilitated by a conspiracy of Republican and Democratic officials in at least four states.

“They waited to find out how many ballots they had to produce in order to steal the Rigged Election,” Trump raged on Twitter as electors began meeting Monday morning.

The president’s campaign has suffered numerous court losses in his bid to flip the election, including a rejection on Friday from the Supreme Court to consider a Trump-backed effort to invalidate all results in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Biden took sharp aim at the failed Supreme Court effort.

“This legal maneuver was an effort by elected officials and one group of states to try to get the Supreme Court to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans in other states, and to hand the presidency to a candidate who lost,” Biden said. “It’s a position so extreme we’ve never seen it before, a position that refused to respect the will of the people.”

New York state's Electoral College members vote for President and Vice President in the Assembly Chamber at the state Capitol in Albany, N.Y., Monday, Dec. 14.

Still, Trump and his allies are pushing for House Republicans to challenge the Electoral College count during the Jan. 6 session. Any such challenges will fail without Democratic support, rendering them little more than toothless publicity stunts.

A growing number of typically Trump-loyal congressional Republicans also admitted ahead of the Electoral College authorization that Biden’s victory was a done deal.

“It’s time for everybody to move on,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, told reporters.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, another member of the Senate’s GOP leadership team, agreed and called any prospective Jan. 6 challenge “a bad mistake.”

“There comes a time when you have to realize that despite your best efforts, you’ve been unsuccessful,” Cornyn said.

In most parts of the country, Monday’s Electoral College certifications were bureaucratic, brief affairs, with legislators, governors and other local politicians performing the duty set out by the Constitution to certify as winner whichever presidential and vice presidential candidates won a state’s popular vote.

President-elect Joe Biden walks offstage with his wife Jill Biden after speaking after the Electoral College formally elected him as president, Monday, Dec. 14, at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. (Patrick Semansky/)

Many states took coronavirus precautions, including Nevada, which affirmed its results over Zoom, and New York, where Gov. Cuomo presided over a socially distanced, facemask-mandated certification session in the Assembly chamber in Albany.

In some states, a heightened security presence outside state capitols underscored the bitterness of the 2020 election.

Patrolling state troopers were in place as electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — some of the battleground states that Biden won and Trump contested — gave Biden and Harris their votes in low-key proceedings.

Cities from coast-to-coast have been on alert for violence as Trump continues to wage his baseless election war.

In Washington, D.C., over the weekend, four people were stabbed after far-right Trump supporters, including members of the Proud Boys, clashed with anti-Trump protesters.

Trump has not condemned the violence.

Instead, his campaign instructed Trump-loyal state legislators to call separate sessions Monday to appoint their own slates of Trump electors in several swing states won by Biden. Republicans did so in a handful of states, including Georgia, but those electors don’t hold any legal weight, making the process mostly pointless.

Lost in Trump’s furious election battle is the COVID-19 pandemic, which reached a grim milestone on Monday, with the U.S. death toll surging past 300,000.

Biden touched on the pandemic in his speech from Delaware.

“We’ve faced difficult times in our history. I know we’ll get through this one,” he said. “So as we start the hard work to be done, may this moment give us the strength to rebuild.”