Democratic presidential candidate Biden is currently in a strong position, within striking distance of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election, but President Donald Trump still has a chance to win. If Trump or Biden loses the election but refuses to concede defeat, what will happen?
Biden had said in June, if he wins, January 20, when the new president is inaugurated, Trump launched a legal challenge to no avail, still refuses to leave the White House, he is “absolutely convinced” that the military will “very quickly” ask Trump to leave.
But, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley (Gen. Mark Milley) told NPR last month, he does not intend to put the military in the middle of any election dispute.
This is not the first time that there has been a suggestion that there may be a contested election and if there is a problem, it will be properly handled by the courts and the U.S. Congress,” said Milley. The U.S. military should not decide the outcome of a U.S. election. The possibility of being involved in it is zero.”
There have been no previous cases of presidents refusing to withdraw from elections, so if such an event were to happen, no one knows the outcome.
The Trump campaign has now filed a lawsuit in multiple states challenging the vote counting process and challenging the electoral votes Biden received.
How should this situation be resolved?
It is important to know that the United States presidential election takes place in two phases: the first is the state counting phase before the electoral college votes are cast in mid-December, and the second is the electoral college counting phase that takes place in Congress in January.
At the state vote counting stage, states whose governors are Democrats but whose legislatures are held by Republicans may end up sending two very different sets of electoral colleges to Washington if there is a bipartisan dispute over the results, according to a study by election scholar Edward B. Foley cited in Marie Claire magazine. States in these situations include Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where the outcome of the election is still in doubt, and Michigan and Wisconsin, where Biden has already been declared the winner by the media.
In this case, these states will have two opposing sets of electoral votes, at which point the GOP Senate President, Vice President Mike Pence, will step in to determine which electoral votes go to each other.
He can choose to forfeit both sets of electoral votes in the two states, which means neither candidate will get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidential election.
In that case, members of Congress would vote for the president and vice president.
The House of Representatives would vote to elect the president, with each state’s delegation sharing one vote, requiring a simple majority of 26 votes to elect the president.
In the Senate, each senator would share one vote, and a simple majority of 51 votes would be needed to elect the vice president.
If no one gets a majority, the situation becomes more complicated.
If the Senate elects the vice president but the House fails to elect the president, the vice president-elect assumes the presidency until the impasse is resolved.
If the two parties can’t agree by Inauguration Day, it will be current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who will remain president until the knot is untied.
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