Dems Break With Ritual Election Denial To Certify Electoral College

A joint session of Congress officially certified President-elect Donald Trump’s election win on Jan. 6, and for the first time since 1988, no Democrat challenged the legitimacy of a Republican being elected president.

Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., presided over the session, where 312 electoral votes were certified in favor of Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance in a session that lasted about 30 minutes. The states being certified in alphabetical order, Texas’s 40 electoral votes ultimately put Trump and Vance over the 270-vote threshold at 289.

The lack of Democrat-led drama in the certification of the election of a Republican president broke the party’s decades-long tradition of denying the results of elections, as they had done in 2000, 2004, and 2016. The last time Democrats did not challenge the results of a GOP presidential victory was at the certification of George H.W. Bush’s win in 1988.

Prior to the certification, Harris released a video saying, “Today, I will perform my constitutional duty as Vice President to certify the results of the 2024 election. This duty is a sacred obligation — one I will uphold guided by love of country, loyalty to our Constitution, and unwavering faith in the American people.”

However, Democrats in the past have made baseless claims about Republicans winning elections, some of which have been fueled by their anger at losing the Electoral College vote while winning the popular vote — which does not affect presidential elections.

In the 2001 certification, Democrats claimed that President George W. Bush had been “selected, not elected” by the U.S. Supreme Court after the Bush v. Gore decision. Multiple Democrats presented challenges to the counting of Florida’s electoral votes, including former Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., who said that there was “overwhelming evidence of official misconduct, deliberate fraud, and an attempt to suppress voter turnout.”

Former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, claimed there were “millions of Americans who have been disenfranchised by Florida’s inaccurate vote count,” and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said Florida’s electoral votes were “fraudulent.”

Although no senators joined the Democrat House members in 2001 (at that time federal law mandated that a least one senator and one representative object for a challenge to be considered), by the 2005 certification, former Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and former Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, joined forces to formally object to Ohio’s electoral votes, despite the fact that Bush won the state by over 100,000 votes.

Former Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said that “the democratic process was thwarted,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., claimed that voting rights were “stolen,” and Waters issued an objection as well. Ultimately, 31 House members and Boxer voted to reject the will of Ohio’s voters.

Perhaps the greatest show of force from Democrats attempting to thwart elections took place in 2017, when the electors from nine states faced objections and Democrats like Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., advanced wild conspiracy theories about “the confirmed and illegal activities engaged by the government of Russia.”

Numerous Democrats falsely claimed that Russia had altered the outcome of the election, one of the key falsehoods of the Russia collusion hoax. Barbara Lee at the time challenged Michigan’s electoral votes because she claimed that “people are horrified by the overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in our elections.” She also pointed to “the malfunction of 87 voting machines.”

Last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., boasted in his speaker election speech that Democrats believe in election outcomes, but on numerous occasions he attempted to deny the results of the 2016 election, saying of Trump, “history will never accept you as a legitimate president.”

In other social media posts, Jeffries claimed, “The more we learn about the 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes. America deserves to know whether we have a FAKE President in the Oval Office #RussianInterference.” He also wrote in 2018, “LIE (more than any administration in the history of the Republic). CHEAT (2016 election/Russian interference). STEAL (one or two Supreme Court seats).”

What remains unanswered, however, is how many Democrats will boycott Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, as so many of them did in 2017 because they denied the results of the election.

At that time, more than 60 Democrats skipped the inauguration in protest of Trump’s win, including election deniers Hastings, Waters, Nadler, and Barbara Lee, led by former Rep. John Lewis.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.