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With incoming-president Joe Biden moving forward in the transition period, states are beginning to certify the winner of their electoral votes. Following suit from the certification of Biden’s win in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania become the next states to certify the Democrat’s victories.
This week, election officials in Michigan certified Biden’s 154,000 vote win in the state with the board of canvassers made up of two from each political party confirming the vote at 3 to 0 with one abstention. The certification of Biden’s win in Michigan also comes as Donald Trump and his allies, including defeated GOP Senator John James urged the panel to delay certification for two weeks in order to audit votes in the predominantly-Democratic Wayne County. This would mark another unsuccessful attempt made by Trump and his allies to try and overturn the election results in his favor.
Prior to the certification, Trump had already tried to meet with the two Republican election officials on the board to overtly do so and undermine Biden’s win. Under state law, Biden now has Michigan’s 16 electoral votes and the Democrat won over Trump by an 8.2 percent margin of votes. This also happens to be a larger margin of votes that Biden has over Trump in other states where he is trying to dispute the results.
Trump has continuously pushed to take legal action by filing lawsuits to challenge the counts. However, the attempts have largely been unsuccessful as Trump and his allies including his legal team have failed to provide evidence to back their claims of election fraud. Even as they pushed for these claims, there is still no evidence and federal judges have dismissed their lawsuits.
Another state where Biden’s win was formally certified was Pennsylvania, a key state that he needed to win more electoral votes than Trump. The state certified his win a day after Michigan, after three weeks of vote canvassing. Governor Tom Wolf tweeted that the State Department had already formalized the vote count for the Democratic ticket, and sent a “certificate of ascertainment” to the national archivist in Washington along with the names of the 20 electors who supported Biden.
Biden secures 20 electoral votes from the state, making him exceed the required electoral vote count to win the presidency.
