States certifying results ahead of Electoral College meeting

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

States have begun certifying their results from the Nov. 3 presidential election in the run-up to the Electoral College meeting in mid-December.

Among the states certifying on Monday was Michigan, where President Donald Trump and his allies tried and failed to delay the process. The vote by a bipartisan state canvassing board in Michigan comes days after certification in Georgia, another hotly contested presidential battleground. Both states and their 16 electoral votes went to Biden.

A total of 16 states have so far certified their results, awarding President-elect Joe Biden 54 of his 306 Electoral College votes and Trump 73 of his 232 votes. Florida is the only one of the four most populous states to certify. Deadlines are early next month for the others: California, Texas and New York.

All states must certify before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14, and any challenge to the results must be resolved by Dec. 8.

Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and the District of Columbia, all won by Biden, are scheduled to certify on Tuesday, along with Indiana and North Carolina, which went to Trump.

Vote certification at the local and state level is typically a ministerial task that gets little notice, occurring after local election officials have conducted audits to ensure their vote tallies are accurate.

That changed this year with Trump's refusal to concede and his unprecedented attempts to overturn the results of the election through a fusillade of legal challenges and attempts to manipulate the certification process in battleground states he lost.

Biden won by wide margins in both the Electoral College and popular vote, where he received nearly 80 million votes, a record.