United States President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris speak in Wilmington, Delaware, on Nov. 7, 2020, after being declared the winners of the presidential election. Both wear masks to help limit the spread of COVID-19.
Credit: © Andrew Harnik, AFP/Getty Images

In the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 2021, the United States certified its electoral count, making official Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. In November 2020, Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, defeated the Republican incumbents (office holders), President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Certifying the electoral count is an activity associated with the Electoral College, a group of representatives that formally elects the president and vice president. On Election Day, in November, voters choose among presidential and vice-presidential tickets (pairings of candidates) from various political parties. But, the votes do not directly determine which candidate will become president. Instead, they determine which party’s electors will represent each state in the Electoral College. The electors, in turn, cast electoral votes on behalf of the states they represent. Electoral votes determine the outcome of the election.

In December, following the election, the electors in each state assemble and cast their ballots. Either by custom or by law, the electors vote for the candidates designated by their party. After the electoral votes are cast, they are sent to the vice president of the United States, acting in his role as president of the Senate. In January, at a joint session of Congress, the vice president opens and tallies the votes. One Democrat and one Republican from each chamber count the votes. The candidate who gets a majority of the electoral votes is declared the winner of the election.

On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, members of Congress convened at the United States Capitol to carry out this largely ceremonial tradition. However, the count was disrupted by protests that turned violent. Supporters of President Trump, who had gathered to challenge the legitimacy of the election, stormed the Capitol, pushing through barriers and climbing walls. Lawmakers were quickly ushered to safety. Shouting and waving flags, the unruly mob entered the official chambers of Congress, as well as the personal offices of senators and representatives. Some damaged or stole property. Others took pictures of themselves occupying one of the nation’s most sacred buildings. Several people were injured, and one woman was shot and killed by the police. Several hours after the raid began, police and security officials cleared the Capitol. Lawmakers returned to the chambers to vote, intent on certifying the election results.

Outgoing Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, a Republican, was one of the first senators to speak when talks resumed. Just hours earlier, Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, had defeated Loeffler in a runoff election. (In November 2020, neither Loeffler nor Warnock received more than half the vote, requiring the state to hold a runoff election.) The Loeffler-Warnock runoff was not the only one held in Georgia on January 5. In another runoff, the Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff defeated Senator David Perdue, a Republican. These victories gave the Democrats slim control of the Senate, reshaping the balance of power.

July 12, 2016

The coalition government of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull retained power in elections held on July 2, 2016.
Credit: © Lukas Coch, EPA/Landov

On Sunday, July 10, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared victory in the country’s recent parliamentary election. Turnbull, who leads a governing coalition of Australia’s Liberal and National parties, made the announcement after opposition leader Bill Shorten, who heads the Labor Party, conceded defeat. More than a week after the July 2 poll, the vote count showed Turnbull’s coalition winning enough seats in the country’s House of Representatives to remain in power. Although some votes are yet to be counted, Turnbull secured enough support from independent legislators and those belonging to smaller parties to form a government even if the coalition does not reach the 76 seats needed to secure a House majority. Preliminary results showed Labor winning at least 66 seats. Turnbull became prime minister in September 2015 after successfully challenging Prime Minister Tony Abbott for the leadership of the Liberal Party. Using a provision of Australia’s Constitution, Turnbull enacted a double dissolution in early 2016—both houses of the federal Parliament were dissolved and fresh elections were called. The election was a sizeable gamble for Turnbull, who had hoped to increase the number of parliamentary seats held by the coalition. However, Turnbull secured a reduced grip on power—at the last federal election in 2013, the coalition won 90 seats to Labor’s 55.

May 29, 2014

Leaders of the 28-member nations of the European Union (EU) met in Brussels this week in response to recent European Parliament elections that gave a boost to a number of Eurosceptic (anti-EU) parties. Both the president of France and the prime minister of the United Kingdom called for major EU reforms. French President Francois Hollande warned Europe to “pay attention” to the election results in France, where his Socialist party lost to the far-right National Front. The National Front—which some have called a neo-Nazi party—collected fully 24.95 percent of the vote, winning a nationwide election for the first time. France’s Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls characterized the results as “more than a warning. It is a shock, an earthquake.”

(© Stephen Hird, Reuters)

French President Francois Hollande (above) and British Prime Minister David Cameron (right) both called for EU reforms in the face of strong showings by far-right parties in European elections (© Balint Porneczi, Bloomberg/Getty Images).

Populist and far-right parties gained ground across the EU, including in Austria, Denmark, Greece, and the United Kingdom. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party lost to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). UKIP campaigned to slash the EU’s powers and return decision-making to individual nations. In Greece, Golden Dawn, an openly neo-Nazi organization, also picked up seats.

Despite the unprecedented gains made by such extremist parties, the pro-EU bloc retains a safe majority in the parliament. Nevertheless, the current president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, noted: “This is a bad day for the European Union when the party [the National Front] with such an openly racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic program gets 25 or 24 percent of the vote in France. . . . The reasons behind such a vote for a party like this party in France is not that people are hard-core extremists. . . .They are disappointed. They have lost trust and hope [in the EU].” International affairs experts note that much of the lost trust and hope stems from years of recession and the necessity of granting massive financial bailouts to various eurozone countries to keep them from defaulting on their national debts. (The eurozone consists of the 18 EU nations that adopted the euro, the common European currency.)

Additional World Book articles:

• Crisis in the Eurozone (a special report)
• Eurozone Crisis: No End in Sight (a special report)

March 10, 2014

North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, was elected yesterday to the nation’s highest legislative body, the Supreme People’s Assembly. He received 100 percent of the votes in his district, where 100 percent of registered voters turned out for the polling. Uniformed soldiers danced together joyfully following the balloting.

The Assembly consists of 687 deputies. Yesterday’s election was the first since Kim inherited power after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011. The state-run Korean Central News Agency described Kim Jong-un’s election as “an expression of all the service personnel and people’s absolute support and profound trust in supreme leader Kim Jong-un as they single-mindedly remain loyal to him.”

Political experts on the situation in North Korea suggested that yesterday’s elections were intended to further consolidate Kim Jong-un’s power; all of the candidates were hand-picked by him; thus, older deputies were replaced with younger officials, whose loyalty to Kim is absolute.

Since assuming power, Kim has engineered a number of political purges to eliminate potential challenges to his rule. In the most dramatic of these, Kim’s uncle–Jang Song-thaek, once the second-most powerful man in the country–was charged with corruption, found guilty, and summarily executed. Experts on North Korea believe that the older deputies rooted out in yesterday’s election included people whom Kim feared may have harbored lingering loyalties to Jang.

Kim Jong-un holds power as ruthlessly as his father and grandfather. (© EPA/KCNA/Alamy Images)

Kim holds many titles, including supreme commander of the armed forces. His grandfather–Kim Il-sung, who ruled North Korea from 1948 until his death in 1994–established an absolute dictatorship, exercising total control over all aspects of society. North Korea remains a totalitarian state, where much of the population lives in profound isolation and dire poverty. A series of natural disasters coupled with an indifferent government resulted in the starvation of an estimated 1 million North Koreans from 1995 through 2000.

Adequate nutrition remains a problem. Since the widespread famine of the 1990′s, mismanagement, bad weather, and inadequate investment in agriculture have hampered recovery efforts. European Union nutrition experts have reported that state-issued food rations, on which two-thirds of North Korea’s population depend, comprise only one-fifth of standard daily nutritional requirements.

Additional World Book articles:

• North Korea 1995 (a Back in Time article)
• North Korea 1996 (a Back in Time article)
• North Korea 1997 (a Back in Time article)
• North Korea 1998 (a Back in Time article)
• North Korea 2000 (a Back in Time article)
• North Korea 2011 (a Back in Time article)

Jan. 18, 2012

Opponents of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on January 17 delivered more than 1 million signatures to the state election board in Madison, the capital, to force a recall election to remove Walker from office. The stacks of petitions, which weighed more than 3,000 pounds (1,360 kilograms), included about twice as many signatures as needed.  The Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in Wisconsin, will review the petitions, which could take months.

Walker was elected in 2010 as part of the Tea Party movement that resulted in conservative Republicans gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives and several governors’ mansions. The petition drive began two months ago, largely in response to a law pushed by Governor Walker that ended nearly all collective bargaining rights for the state’s unionized public employees. (Collective bargaining is the negotiation about wages, hours, and other working conditions between workers organized as a group and their employer or employers.) The governor also cut spending for education and other programs while lowering taxes on businesses. Tens of thousands of people voiced their anger over the legislation by participating in massive protests at the state’s Capitol Building in March 2011.

There have only been two successful gubernatorial recalls in U.S. history: against North Dakota Governor Lynn Frazier in 1921 and California Governor Gray Davis in 2003.

Additional World Book articles:

• Industrial relations
• Labor movement
• North Dakota (History–The Early 1900′s)
• Back in Time 2003 (State government)
• Back in Time 2010 (State government)