Kamala Harris Set To Certify Trump Next President

US lawmakers led by Vice President Kamala Harris are set to gather on Monday for a joint session of Congress to certify Donald Trump’s presidential election win.

It is a procedure that happens every four years after the vote and two weeks before the president’s inauguration.

In a bitter twist of fate, Vice President Kamala Harris who is constitutionally the president of the Senate is set to preside over the session and certify her Republican rival, Donald Trump as president.

GWG.ng reports that the last time a rival was made to certify a rival as Harris is set to Trump’s victory was in January 2001 when Vice President Al Gore presided over the certification of Mr George Bush as winner of the 2000 presidential election.

The procedure had almost gone uninterrupted until 2020 when a group of Trump’s supporters rioted at the Capitol to try to stop the formal vote-counting and overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.

This year’s certification will bring Trump a step closer to returning to the White House, after the Republican won the 2024 contest against Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Because of her role as leader of the Senate, Harris will oversee the certification of Trump as president.

What happens during the certification?

According to federal law, Congress must gather on 6 January to certify the election results.

Procession of the ballots: The sealed votes arrived at the Capitol addressed to the vice president in her role as president of the Senate. The votes are placed in ceremonial leather-bound boxes and processed from the Senate to the House by a group of Senate pages.

Procession of senators to the House: Senators follow the electoral boxes to the House to convene the joint session.

Members convene for joint session: Federal law stipulates that members must convene at 1 p.m. for the opening of the presidential election results. The House sergeant at arms announces the president of the Senate (Harris) and senators as in the State of the Union address, and then the president of the Senate takes the dais and becomes the presiding officer of the ceremony. The speaker of the House usually sits behind the vice president.

“Tellers” come to the dais: Two House members and two Senate members who have been selected by the speaker and Senate majority leader help shepherd the ceremony by reading out the votes alphabetically by state. This is typically the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Rules and House Administration committees.

Harris reads the votes by each state in alphabetical order: Starting with Alabama, Harris will open the certificates and hand them down to one of the tellers. After the teller announces the result, Harris will ask if there are any objections. If there are objections as there were in 2021, this would be when they’re heard.

If the threshold for an objection is reached: Harris would announce that the two chambers will deliberate separately on the pending objection and report its decision back to the joint session. The Senate would withdraw from the joint session and return to its chamber. Both chambers would get up to two hours to debate whether to uphold the objection. It requires the vote of half of each chamber to sustain an objection.

Never in their history has either chamber sustained an objection.

Completing the process: The vice president will announce the whole number of electoral votes (538) and what constitutes a simple majority (217) and announce how many electoral votes each candidate got, then do the same for vice president.The vice president will declare the joint session dissolved. Usually there is applause, and the certification is complete.

How long does all this take?: There have been instances in which certification has taken less than half an hour. In 2017, the certification of President Trump’s first term, presided over by then-Vice President Joe Biden, took 41 minutes.

In 2021, Congress convened at 1 p.m. in a joint session and, because of both a prolonged recess due to the breach of the Capitol and multiple state objections, did not complete its work certifying the election until 3:39 a.m. on Jan. 7.

GWG.ng reports that before now Harris had been largely out of the radar and the duty to certify Trump will be about one of the last political acts in her career.

With additional reports from ABC News

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