Pennsylvania electors cast their votes for Biden

In a ceremony often considered as little more than a formality, Pennsylvania’s College of Electors on Monday certified their 20 votes for president-elect Joe Biden.

The event mirrored similar ceremonies in states across the nation, as state electors cast ballots in a constitutionally mandated event to formalize Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College victory over President Trump.

The vote will be presented to Congress for the official count Jan. 6, cementing Biden’s status as president-elect, even as the Trump campaign contests the election.

Although threats of violence marred Electoral College meetings in several states, and protesters gathered in Harrisburg several days earlier, Nancy Patton Mills, chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said state police, who escorted electors to the Forum Auditorium in the Capitol complex Monday, reported no problems.

“I think the vote has been pretty well resolved in Pennsylvania,” Mills said. The Moon Township Democrat noted it was Biden’s 81,000-vote margin in the Keystone state that took him over the top in the Electoral College as the count stretched on for days.

The state’s 20 electors sat spaced throughout the auditorium built to seat hundreds as Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, standing in for Gov. Tom Wolf, called the gathering to order at noon. The pared-down ceremony, in which socially distanced electors sported face masks and stopped short of celebratory mingling, echoed the tone of Biden-Harris campaign rallies during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mills said she was proud to preside over the event, which formalized the status of the first female vice president-elect on the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage.

“This is a great day for democracy, a great day for liberty and a great day for Pennsylvania,” Mills said.

It was a long time coming, she said, adding that her mother Nancy Springer Patton organized the first Democratic Party in Moon Township as a 16-year-old activist in 1920, the year women won the right vote.

History abounded in Harrisburg on Monday as Pennsylvania’s electors solemnly walked to the stage, one by one, to cast their votes in a ballot box designed by Benjamin Franklin.

Like Mills, Erie County Executive Kathy Dahlkemper was a first-time elector at Monday’s event.

“In 2009, I was in Congress when they counted the electoral votes for Obama. And to be now on the other side of this process was pretty interesting. I was proud to be here as the only elector from Northwestern Pennsylvania,” Dahlkemper said.

She said a lot of the women were wearing white in honor of the centennial of women’s suffrage and the election of Harris.

As Democratic electors cast their ballots for the Biden-Harris ticket, the state’s Republican electors gathered at an undisclosed location. Bernie Comfort, Pennsylvania chair of the Trump campaign, said the electors met to cast their ballots at the request of the organization, which is seeking to record support for the president.

“This is in no way an effort to usurp or contest the will of Pennsylvania voters,” Comfort said.

Although Trump has lost 55 court challenges in multiple states, he is vowing to continue attempts to overturn the election that Biden won by more than six million votes.

Winning the popular vote, however, does not ensure a candidate will become president. Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to its congressional delegation, and it is the vote of the electors in the Electoral College, not the popular vote, which ultimately determines the president and vice president.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots. But she lost the Electoral College vote to Trump, who picked up narrow wins in several large states to pull a margin of 304 to 227 in the Electoral College.

In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by about a half-million votes. Bush nonetheless became the first presidential candidate in more than a century to lose the popular vote and ascend to the White House after winning a one-vote majority in the Electoral College.