How the electoral vote count will play out this year

(CNN) — Congressional Democrats on Monday are expected to offer President-elect Donald Trump the unremarkable, perhaps even dull transfer of power he and a band of pro-Trump rioters denied President Joe Biden exactly four years ago.

It is January 6 again and that means federal lawmakers will count the Electoral College votes, in accordance with the 12th Amendment, and formally announce Trump as the next president. He will be sworn-in at his inauguration on January 20.

Four years ago, Trump whipped up a crowd near the White House, declaring, “We will never concede” the election, before warning the aggrieved throng, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Shortly afterward, a mob pushed through barricades and eventually forced its way into the US Capitol, assaulting law enforcement officials, threatening lawmakers and trashing the building – all as Trump sat by, watching media coverage, tweeting against Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to block the certification and, eventually, issuing a few social media posts asking the rioters to “stay peaceful.”

There is no such drama on tap this time around. Democrats are not planning any protests – not among House members and senators during the count, nor on the grounds adjacent to the Congress or White House. Vice President Kamala Harris, who like Trump in 2020 lost this year’s election, is expected to be present, but only to preside – in her role as president of the Senate – over a joint session where lawmakers will confirm Trump’s victory.

The process they will follow is largely the same as the one that guided past quadrennial gatherings, though a new law called the Electoral Count Reform Act, passed in the aftermath of the 2021 insurrection, will make it more difficult for dissident lawmakers to raise objections to any state’s electoral votes.

How will the count work?

This year, the confirmation of Trump’s win will play out as follows:

The House of Representatives and Senate will meet, per federal law, at 1 p.m. ET for the counting of the electoral votes. This follows a process from December 17, when electors met in their respective states and cast votes for president and vice president. There were no “faithless electors,” or electors who cast ballots against the will of the voters, so Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance each received 312 votes. Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz each received 226 votes.

Going in alphabetical order, Harris in her role as president of the Senate will open each state’s certificate of electoral votes and hand them to one of the four “tellers” – a pair of them coming from both the House and Senate. The teller will then read, record, and tally the certificates of electoral votes from each state and the District of Columbia.

This is the point in the process when members can challenge a state’s electoral votes. But for the objection to be heard, it must be submitted in writing and signed by at least one-fifth of the House and one-fifth of the Senate. That’s a higher bar than in past years, when only one member of the House and one Senator could pause the proceedings. The grounds for lodging an objection are also stricter now, because of the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act.

That legislation also explicitly limited the role of the President of the Senate – Pence’s title in 2021 – to what’s described now as “solely ministerial.” In plain English, that means Harris, now in the same position, has no power to accept, reject or in way, shape or form influence the process or its outcome.

Pence ultimately refused Trump’s demands to upend the count. In a Fox News interview on August 2, 2023, the former vice president insisted that Trump and a “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” urged him to intervene.

“President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes,” Pence sad. “I had no authority to do that.”

That’s as true today as it was four years ago, but the letter of the law leaves less room for imaginative attorneys to make a case for meddling. Harris is now poised to certify her own loss in the presidential election – days after swearing in, on January 3, some of the same senators who agitated to block her ascent in 2021.

When the final tallies are in, Harris will announce the certified count. According to the law, that declaration will be considered final or, in legal terms, “shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons” elected president and vice president.

Can there be objections?

The combination of a stricter legal structure and Trump’s victory last year has likely returned boredom to the process. No objections are expected. Should that change, and a protest is properly submitted, the joint session would again be suspended, with the House and Senate leaving to debate, in separate spaces, for a maximum of two hours. They would then commence voting on whether to accept or reject the objection.

During the debate, speaking time is limited to five minutes per House member or senator. Members can only address the chamber once before the votes begin.

For an electoral vote to be thrown out, both the House and Senate must agree to sustain the objection. Again, this is considered highly unlikely. The objection must then be disposed of before the next state’s electoral votes can be acted upon. A House-Senate split would also mean the objection has failed and the counting must resume as scheduled.

In 2017, after Trump’s first victory over Hillary Clinton, then-Vice President Joe Biden presided over the joint session of Congress as the president of the Senate. A group of House Democrats objected to several states’ electoral votes, citing issues with voter suppression and Russia’s election interference, but no senators signed on to formalize the objections. Biden dismissed the objections and continued with the counting of the electoral votes to finalize Trump’s victory.

What happened last time?

In 2021, Republicans objected to the results from several states, and had enough support to force Congress to debate them for two – Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Both efforts failed. But after the House and Senate separated to consider the first one, from Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (along with others), the Capitol was overrun. The chambers did not reconvene until later in the evening, after the rioters were flushed from the building, when both full bodies voted down the objection.

The shenanigans were not over, though, as Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley lodged another objection, this time to the results from Pennsylvania. That too was voted down by overwhelming majorities of both chambers.

The two challenges in 2021 matched the grand total from every election since 1887, after the first version of the Electoral Count Act was originally enacted. The law, an afterthought in American politics for decades, was reinforced to protect against frivolous protests by Congress in 2022.

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