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President-elect Joe Biden will give a prime-time address Monday night after members of the Electoral College gather across the United States to cast their ballots for president and vice president.
According to the Biden transition team, the former vice president will be delivering remarks from Wilmington, Delaware, about "the Electoral College vote certification and the strength and resilience of our democracy."
The speech is slated to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Biden's remarks will be streamed online by C-SPAN. At the time of publication, Biden's team had yet to set up a live stream on its official YouTube channel, but it is common for his speeches to be available there.
All 538 members of the Electoral College will meet Monday to formally cast their ballots, a key step in formalizing Biden's victory. The next major step in the electoral process will happen on January 6, when Congress is expected to hold a joint session and read out the 2020 vote totals.
Biden is the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to surpass 80 million votes. As of Monday, the Democrat had amassed 81,283,495 votes, leading President Donald Trump by more than 7 million. He's expected to win 306 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed to clinch an Electoral College victory.
But Trump has yet to concede the race. Instead, he's continued to spread unsubstantiated accusations of widespread voter fraud and election irregularities. Earlier this month, Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department had not discovered any voting fraud on a scale that could have affected the election's outcome.
The president and his Republican allies have filed numerous lawsuits in key battleground states challenging the vote count and election procedures. All but one have been dismissed or tossed out by the courts.
Post-election litigation even reached the Supreme Court last week, after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Court to overturn results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—which all went for Biden. Paxton accused the states of exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to make last-minute changes to election procedures, thereby skewing the outcome of the 2020 race.
The Supreme Court rejected the legal bid last Friday, writing, "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot."
Trump, who joined the Texas lawsuit in his personal capacity as a candidate, said that the Court "chickened out" and that its decision was "so bad for our country!"
He has also insisted he's not done fighting the 2020 election results, even after the high court's ruling.
"No, it's not over," Trump told Fox News over the weekend. "We keep going. And we're going to continue to go forward. We have numerous local cases."
About the writer
Alexandra Hutzler is currently a staff writer on Newsweek's politics team. Prior to joining Newsweek in summer 2018, she was ... Read more