A joint session of US Congress formally certified President-elect Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential vote on Monday, in a legal process ahead of his inauguration as the United States' 47th president two weeks later.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in the Nov. 5 showdown, presided over the session as the president of the Senate, and announced the results of the Electoral College vote count. The president-elect won 312 votes versus Harris' 226.
"This announcement of the state of the vote by the president of the Senate shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons elected president and vice president of the United States, each for a term beginning on the 20th day of January 2025 and shall be entered together with the list of the votes on the journals of the House and the Senate," Harris said.
The certification process is usually a routine, uneventful procedure, but it was disrupted four years ago by a group of Trump's supporters who stormed the Capitol, disrupting the procedure following Trump's loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Though Harris did not dispute the election outcome and with little or no chance of disruption at the certification event, security had been stepped up around the Capitol, with the Homeland Security Department having reportedly designated the procedure as a "national special security event."
In 2022, Congress passed a law aimed at preventing any move to challenge the outcome of the presidential vote. (Yonhap)
