What are the electors?
The US president is not elected by a direct majority. Instead, each state appoints electors to choose the president according to a process set out in the US Constitution. The winning candidate must receive at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes.
Former US President Donald Trump. Photo: AA
Each state will have a number of electoral votes corresponding to the size of its congressional delegation. For example, California will have 54 electoral votes in the 2024 presidential election, while sparsely populated states like Vermont and Wyoming will have just three.
Each presidential candidate will have their own slate of electors in each state, called a "slate." After the election, the electoral votes will be awarded to the slate of the winning candidate in that state.
In 48 of the 50 states, the person who wins the most popular votes receives all of the state’s electoral votes. Only two states, Maine and Nebraska, award electoral votes based on their share of the vote. In 2020, those two states also split their electoral votes among candidates.
The electors vote on behalf of their candidate and send the results to Congress, which counts the votes and certifies the winner. If no candidate has a majority, the House of Representatives chooses the President and the Senate chooses the Vice President.
In most elections, the candidate with the largest share of the popular vote also wins the majority of electoral votes. But on five occasions, the candidate with the smallest number of popular votes has won the election. The most recent was in 2016, when Mr. Trump won 304 electoral votes despite winning 3 million fewer votes nationwide than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
On July 18, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced criminal charges against 16 people for submitting fake slates of electors to try to help Mr. Trump overturn his 2020 election loss to Mr. Biden.
What happens after the 2020 election?
According to the congressional commission investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his allies sought to overturn his defeat by persuading Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states to appoint electors who supported him, or refuse to appoint any electors at all.
Law professor John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, wrote legal memos arguing that state legislatures have the authority to choose their own electors, according to the commission’s final report.
Mr. Trump and his supporters, including Rudy Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, have called on lawmakers in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia to take such actions, but none have followed through.
However, Mr. Trump and his allies assembled their own slates of electors in the seven states he lost. Those electors met on December 14, 2020, to vote for Mr. Trump, the same day that the legitimate electors cast their votes for Mr. Biden.
Those ballots have no legal standing, but Mr. Trump and his supporters used them to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the actual results from the states in question during the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional session to certify the election results.
That could leave Mr Biden short of the majority needed, giving Republicans in Congress the opportunity to declare Mr Trump the winner. Mr Pence has refused to do so, saying he does not have the authority to reject electors.
On January 6, Mr Trump held a rally in front of the White House and told the crowd it would be a “sad day for our country” if Mr Pence did not do so. Thousands of his supporters then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the certification of Mr Biden’s victory.
Five people were killed and more than 140 police officers were injured in the incident. The Capitol suffered millions of dollars in damage. More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the attack.
Hoang Ton (according to Reuters)
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