Now that the 22% Manchurian candidate was blessed by the Electors (who failed to fulfill the Founders' requirement that they protect the country against foreign powers influencing the selection of our next President), you are probably wondering what is next.
Voices4Hillary cannot predict the next tweet or next inappropriate appointment (though we can predict both will occur). For now, here are the procedural activities that will follow, leading to the Inauguration on January 20. This is from the New York Times account on December 19, 2016.
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On Friday, Jan. 6, at 1 p.m., members of the House and Senate will meet in the House chamber to count those votes. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as the departing president of the Senate, is expected to preside over the count, during which every state's vote is opened and announced in alphabetical order.
Mr. Biden will then declare the winner based on who has the majority of votes — at least 270. (That has led, three times, to an awkward moment when the sitting vice president has announced his own defeat, according to the House historian's office. That happened most recently in 2001, to Al Gore.)
And that's it?
Not quite. At that point, Mr. Biden will ask if there are any objections, and lawmakers can then challenge either individual electoral votes or state results as a whole. If an elector has chosen to vote against state results, that is the moment when lawmakers can petition to throw that vote out.
Objections must be in writing and signed by at least one member of the House and one member of the Senate. If there are any objections, the House and Senate then immediately split up to consider them and have just two hours to decide whether they support the objection or not.
Both chambers will then reconvene and share their decisions; if both the House and the Senate agree with the objection, then they will throw out the votes in question. But Congress has never sustained an objection to an electoral vote.
After any and all objections have been resolved, the results are considered final. The next step is to swear in the winner on Jan. 20.
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December 20, 2016
