Harris to oversee electoral count, restoring norm that Trump shattered
Vice President Kamala Harris has called President-elect Donald Trump a threat to American democracy. She has said he is a fascist. She has predicted he would abuse the powers of the presidency. She has warned that he should “never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States.”
But on Monday, in her constitutional role as president of the Senate, Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress that oversees the counting and certification of the electoral college votes affirming that Trump – despite the alarms she sounded during her 107-day sprint to the November election – will again assume the powers and trappings of the presidency.
The task, by statute, always falls to the vice president on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, and this will not be the first time the role may be excruciating. Four other vice presidents who sought the nation’s highest office – including Al Gore and Richard M. Nixon – have had to stand in the House chamber, in front of hundreds of lawmakers, and formalize their own loss. But Monday’s event stands out for the sheer intensity of the warnings that Harris and other Democrats sounded about the dangers of the man whose victory she is set to formalize.
The certification carries additional historical importance because it comes just four years – and one presidential election – after a violent mob, infuriated by Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen by Joe Biden, stormed the U.S. Capitol as then-Vice President Mike Pence presided over the 2020 electoral count. This time, Trump is welcoming the result and Democrats are showing no signs of claiming fraud. Even so, law enforcement officials are planning extensive security arrangements to ensure nothing disrupts the proceeding.
Harris intends to make sure the certification goes smoothly, aides say, partly as a pointed contrast to Trump’s unwillingness to do so four years ago.
Presidential historian Tim Naftali noted that from the first days after Harris’ loss, she and Biden made it clear they would provide “the kind of transition for Donald Trump that Donald Trump refused to provide for them four years ago.” Harris promised in her concession speech to ease the new administration’s transition to power, while Biden hosted Trump – whom he had called an “existential threat” – in a White House meeting that was so cordial it annoyed some of Biden’s fellow Democrats.
“This is, in a sense, a way to meet one of their campaign promises,” said Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “Their administration came to power to restore dignity and to restore American institutions. And even though they are leaving the Oval Office to the person they replaced, whose chaos they were elected to eliminate, they have one last opportunity to send a message about the importance of traditional norms.”
Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign manager for the 2000 election and advised Harris during her 2024 campaign, said that even though the moment will resonate with the sting of Harris’ loss, the vice president is intent on ensuring the country sees “what it truly means to have a peaceful transition of power.”
“She’s not holding grudges. She’s not finger-pointing,” Brazile said. “Next week is going to be just another chapter, another chapter in her very long and distinguished career.”
Brazile recalled watching Gore preside over the 2001 certification of his defeat in a much closer election, one that required the Supreme Court to affirm George W. Bush’s victory following a bitterly fought recount in Florida. In that moment, Brazile said, Gore – who won the popular vote only to fall short in the electoral college – was a “statesman” who knew that when the Supreme Court rendered its verdict, “the fight was over.”
“The same is true of what happened with Kamala Harris – after the verdict came in, she accepted the verdict,” Brazile said. “Gore, like Harris and like Pence – they are institutionalists. They believe in the rule of law. They believe in a peaceful transition.”
Beyond the physical assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, some Republican senators challenged Biden’s win in key states, although most reversed their position after the riot, which resulted in several deaths.
For decades, Congress’ counting and certification of the electoral college votes was a routine event, until some Trump supporters in 2021 devised theories and strategies for upending it, none of which held up in court.
Although there is no dispute over the results of the 2024 election, the unexpected violence that unfolded in 2021 has cast a shadow over Monday’s proceedings as law enforcement authorities face pressure to ensure that no security threats mar the day. For the first time, the Department of Homeland Security has designated the certification of votes as a “National Special Security Event,” which paved the way for the Secret Service and other agencies to develop what they described as “a comprehensive and integrated security plan to ensure the safety and security of this event and its participants.”
Monday also marks the first time the certification will take place after the 2022 overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, which Congress enacted to shore up weaknesses in that law that were exposed by the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
The legislation reaffirmed that the vice president has only a ministerial role at the session where electoral college votes are counted, a direct response to Trump’s false assertions in 2021 that Pence could have overturned the election results. That assertion led to threats on Pence’s life from Trump supporters when he refused to do so.
The measure also raised the threshold necessary for members of Congress to object to a state’s electors. At the time, Biden called the bill a “critical bipartisan action that will help ensure that the will of the people is preserved.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, added after the legislation’s passage that “the Electoral Count process was never meant to be a trigger point for an insurrection, and that is why we are reforming it.”
She added, “We are now one step closer to protecting our democracy and preventing another January 6th.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, leaders of both parties were quick to condemn it as an inexcusable assault on democracy, and many directly blamed Trump. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called Trump “morally responsible,” and many participants have been convicted of such crimes as assaulting a police officer and entering a restricted federal building.
But since then, many in the GOP, led by Trump, have sought to reframe the riot as a heroic act by patriots concerned about democracy. The president-elect has pledged to pardon, within minutes or hours of taking office, people convicted in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and he has baselessly said that members of the House committee that investigated it, including former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, “should go to jail.”
Biden and others are seeking to challenge that rewriting of history. On Thursday night, the president awarded Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal for “putting country before party.” Biden noted during the medal ceremony that he had previously honored “law enforcement officers who defended our Capitol on January 6th and the state and local election officials, elected leaders who defended the free and fair election 2020.”
Brian Fallon, a Democratic strategist who advised Harris during her 2024 run, said she views Monday’s certification as a critical moment in reestablishing the historical norm that a presidential candidate who falls short voluntarily concedes power to their opponent.
“It is important to the vice president that the day go as the Constitution intends, to show that January 6, 2021, was an aberration and the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is being restored,” Fallon said.
Still, Monday will be a difficult day for many of Harris’s supporters as they come to grips with the reality of Trump’s return to the White House on Jan. 20. When Gore certified the electoral votes in 2001, his backers approached him at the Capitol to tell him he should have been affirming his victory rather than his defeat.
“It’s a surreal and humiliating moment for Kamala Harris to have to certify her own loss to a man that she dubbed a fascist,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “Yet that’s what duty calls her as the vice president to do.”