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Election results have now been certified in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., moving Joe Biden one step closer to the White House.

Electors will meet in each state on Monday to cast their votes.

The results reported right after the presidential election were reliable, but they were not official.

In the weeks since Election Day, officials in every state have been verifying the vote tallies, a process called certification.

This starts at the county or municipal level, and then a state official or board must review the local certifications and certify the statewide totals.

In presidential races, if states certify their results by the so-called safe harbor deadline — this year, it’s Dec. 8 — those results are largely insulated from further challenges.

The Trump campaign’s unsuccessful strategy was to try to delay the certification processes in the key battleground states that Biden won.

As of Nov. 30, all of those states had certified their results.

 

 

The Supreme Court yesterday rejected a last-minute bid to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, a major setback to Trump’s effort to reverse his loss.

Trump then said he would join a new Supreme Court complaint, filed by the Texas attorney general, that targets results from four swing states.

Trump’s legal efforts have been struck down in federal cases in Georgia and Michigan and in state courts in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin.

More than 200 Republicans in Congress have declined to take a stand on Trump’s false claim of winning the election.

Trump has spread claims that voting software is “used in states where tens of thousands of votes were stolen from us and given to Biden.”

He said in repeated tweets that Dominion Voting Systems is “horrible, inaccurate and anything but secure,” all of which were flagged by Twitter as disputed.

He retweeted a baseless report that the voting-machine system had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”

There is no evidence that any voting systems were compromised, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

“The systems and processes used by election officials to tabulate votes and certify official results are protected by various safeguards that help ensure the accuracy of election results,” the agency notes on its “Rumor Control” page that refutes disinformation and misinformation about the accuracy of the election results.

“These safeguards include measures that help ensure tabulation systems function as intended, protect against malicious software, and enable the identification and correction of any irregularities.”

Trump fired the agency’s director on Nov. 17 with a tweet that carried a now-commonplace disclaimer from Twitter: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”

Christopher Krebs led successful efforts to help state and local election offices protect their systems and oversaw efforts to safeguard against foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns.

He had countered Trump’s unfounded claims of ballot fraud.

 

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