Congress’s job on 6 January is a narrow one. The House and Senate meet together, open the sealed votes each state’s electors already cast, count them out loud, and declare who won. The vice president presides, and under the 12th Amendment has no authority to reject a state’s votes or delay the count. The role is to open envelopes and read totals, nothing more.
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That single afternoon is the last of several steps, not the first. Electors chosen in each state cast their votes for president in December, and those votes travel to Washington as paperwork rather than ballots. A governor signs a document naming the state’s electors, and it goes to the National Archives along with the count. Congress is not reopening the vote when it meets in January. It is checking that the documents in front of it match what each state has already certified.
Inside the chamber on counting day
Members of the House and Senate walk into the House chamber, and each state’s electoral votes are secured in mahogany boxes. Appointed members read out each state’s tally in turn, working alphabetically, and once the count is done the presiding officer announces the totals. Once every state has been read, the process typically ends with a winner formally declared.
The vice president who reads out that result has sometimes announced their own defeat. Al Gore did it in 2001, and Richard Nixon did it in 1961. George H. W. Bush had the happier task of confirming his own win in 1989. Kamala Harris joined that list on 6 January 2025, presiding over the count that made Donald Trump the next president after her own defeat to him. She read out her own losing tally to a standing ovation from Democratic members of the chamber. Before that day arrived, her spokesperson, Kirsten Allen, said Harris intended to treat the session as Pence had treated his in 2021: a job to finish, not a decision to make.
Why a lawmaker’s objection rarely goes anywhere
A member of Congress can object to a state’s electoral votes as they are read out, and Congress then debates and votes on whether to accept them. That happened in January 2021, when congressional Republicans tried to reject Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s results on spurious claims of widespread voter fraud. The House voted down the Arizona challenge 303 to 122, and the Senate voted it down 93 to 6. Pennsylvania’s challenge failed 282 to 138 in the House and 92 to 7 in the Senate. Attempts to raise the same objection against Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin never got a single senator to sign on, so those votes were never debated at all.
Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022, making it harder for a small group of lawmakers to force one of these votes in the first place. The law followed directly from what had happened at the previous count. Rioters loyal to Trump broke through police lines and windows to reach the House chamber that day, causing close to $3 million in damage and injuring more than 100 police officers. Some built a gallows on the Capitol grounds and called for Pence to be hanged. He had refused to do what Trump’s allies wanted: throw out electoral votes the vice president has no constitutional power to touch. The House later impeached Trump over the riot, though the Senate fell short of the two-thirds vote needed to convict him.
When no candidate wins a majority
The system has a backup for a split result. If nobody wins a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses the president, but not by the usual headcount. Each state’s delegation casts a single vote as a bloc, and a candidate needs 26 state delegations, not 26 individual votes, to win. The Senate separately votes on the vice president in the same tie-break. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, set out this fallback.
There is a further backstop if Congress has certified nobody by the time a new presidential term is due to begin at noon on 20 January. Federal succession law then names an acting president from whichever elected official is available, starting with the Speaker of the House. A dispute over competing slates of electors from one state, the kind that arose after the 1876 election, gets resolved by rules Congress wrote in 1887, which have never come up again.
By the time Harris sat down after certifying Trump’s win in January 2025, most of the tension in the room belonged to people rather than to the procedure. Vance sat next to Senator Bill Cassidy, one of the few Republicans who had voted to convict Trump over the 2021 riot. The session ran to its scripted end, and changed nothing anyone in that chamber did not already know.
