2025

This Jan. 6 won’t be the same.

Four years ago, then-President Donald Trump urged supporters to head to the Capitol to protest Congress’ certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

“Will be wild!” Trump promised on Twitter a few weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. And it was.

Trump gave a vitriolic speech to thousands of people gathered at the Ellipse behind the White House, after which many marched to the Capitol and stormed the building in an attempt to stop the previously routine final step in formalizing the winner of the presidential election. Even after the rioters dispersed, eight Republicans in the Senate and 139 in the House voted against ratifying Biden’s win in certain swing states, despite no evidence of problems or wrongdoing that could have affected the outcome.

This year, the only turbulence preceding the quadrennial ratification of the presidential election resulted from House Republicans fighting among themselves over who should be speaker.

“There will be no violence. There will be no attempt to mount an insurrection against the Constitution,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “It will be a lot more like what we’ve seen for the rest of American history.”

The last time, Trump urged his vice president, Mike Pence, who was presiding over the certification, to intervene to keep him in the White House. This time, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee against Trump, has acknowledged her loss and isn’t expected to try to change long-established procedures for certifying the election. No other prominent Democrat has urged the party to contest Trump’s win, either.

Congress also has since updated the law that governs the proceeding, clarifying the process in the states and specifying the vice president’s role as merely ministerial.

After the 2020 election, many Republicans contended there were signs of massive voter fraud that made it impossible to confirm Biden’s victory, even though there has never been any indication of widespread fraud. After Trump won this November, many of those same Republicans had no such objections, saying they trusted the accuracy of the vote count. It was a change in sentiment shared by Republicans across the country.

“As citizens, we should all be happy when it goes smoothly,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. “It’s always better not to have major contestation over elections, especially when there isn’t a reasonable position for it.”

Still, the calm may be illusory.

Trump and Republicans had signaled that if had Harris won, they were prepared to contest her victory. Vice President-elect JD Vance, as an Ohio senator, argued that Pence should have acted to overturn Biden’s election.

Vance himself is set to be in the position to preside over the next significant Jan. 6 — in 2029, when Congress will be scheduled to accept the electoral votes for the winner of the 2028 presidential election.

“The most dangerous January 6 event is not January 6, 2025. It’s January 6, 2029, and beyond,” said David Weinberg of Protect Democracy, which defends against what it terms authoritarian threats to the country. “It creates an enormous problem when only one side of the aisle stands down when it loses an election.”

The Constitution lays out some basic steps required to choose the next president, and congressional legislation has filled in the procedural blanks. After states choose their winning candidates on Election Day, electors who are pledged to vote for those candidates meet as the Electoral College and formally cast their votes for president.

Congress then tallies the votes on Jan. 6 in a joint session presided over by the vice president to formally determine who’s won a majority of the Electoral College.

In 2021, Trump pushed for Pence not to read out the tallies from swing states that Biden won, thereby forcing Congress to vote to accept a list of states where Trump won the majority of the Electoral College. That ploy was something that Pence and numerous legal scholars said was an unconstitutional act.

A year later, Biden signed the bipartisan bill that updated the 1887 law governing the joint session to make clear the vice president needs to read all of the state tallies. The Electoral Count Reform Act also makes it harder to object to the congressional vote.

Still, many House Republicans remain opposed to that law.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was a prime supporter of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss and had not ruled out trying to change the election outcome if Trump lost in November. Republicans spent the final weeks of the election contending Democrats would do the same if Trump won, citing a push by some to disqualify the former president from the ballot under the Constitution’s once-obscure “insurrection clause.” That effort ultimately was rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Republicans say the size of Trump’s election victory is why there is no potential unrest. He won the presidency by about 230,000 votes in the swing states and the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points after losing by about 44,000 votes in the swing states and 4.5 percentage points nationwide in 2020.

“This time, I think the win was so decisive that it just — for good or ill depending on which side you’re on — it’s stifled most of that,” said Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican who led the objections on Jan. 6, 2021, over groundless allegations of voter fraud.

Foley, author of the book “Ballot Battles” about election challenges in U.S. history, advised Congress on changes to the law governing the joint session and its certification of the presidential election. He said he hoped the 2024 election marks the end of groundless challenges to congressional certification, even though the candidate who spearheaded the last challenge won.

That’s because Trump has said he won’t run again and is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term. Foley noted that, in 2022, a number of Republicans tried to mimic Trump’s distrust of election results and widely lost in swing states. Election denial, he said, may not be viable if not attached to Trump.

“As Trump will never be a candidate again,” Foley said, “I hope this is beyond us.”

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AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The congressional joint session to count electoral votes on Monday is expected to be much less eventful than the certification four years ago that was interrupted by a violent mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump who tried to stop the count and overturn the results of an election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

This time, Trump is returning to office after winning the 2024 election that began with Biden as his party’s nominee and ended with Vice President Kamala Harris atop the ticket. She will preside over the certification of her own loss, fulfilling the constitutional role in the same way that Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, did after the violence subsided on Jan. 6, 2021.

Usually a routine affair, the congressional joint session on Jan. 6 every four years is the final step in reaffirming a presidential election after the Electoral College officially elects the winner in December. The meeting is required by the Constitution and includes several distinct steps.

A look at the joint session:

Under federal law, Congress must meet Jan. 6 to open sealed certificates from each state that contain a record of their electoral votes. The votes are brought into the chamber in special mahogany boxes that are used for the occasion.

Bipartisan representatives of both chambers read the results out loud and do an official count. The vice president, as president of the Senate, presides over the session and declares the winner.

The Constitution requires Congress to meet and count the electoral votes. If there is a tie, then the House decides the presidency, with each congressional delegation having one vote. That hasn’t happened since the 1800s, and won’t happen this time because Trump’s electoral win over Harris was decisive, 312-226.

Congress tightened the rules for the certification after the violence of 2021 and Trump’s attempts to usurp the process.

In particular, the revised Electoral Count Act passed in 2022 more explicitly defines the role of the vice president after Trump aggressivelypushed Pence to try and object to the Republican’s defeat — an action that would have gone far beyond Pence’s ceremonial role. Pence rebuffed Trump and ultimately gaveled down his own defeat. Harris will do the same.

The updated law clarifies that the vice president does not have the power to determine the results on Jan. 6.

Harris and Pence were not the first vice presidents to be put in the uncomfortable position of presiding over their own defeats. In 2001, Vice President Al Gore presided over the counting of the 2000 presidential election that he narrowly lost to Republican George W. Bush. Gore had to gavel several Democrats’ objections out of order.

In 2017, Biden as vice president presided over the count that declared Trump the winner. Biden also shot down objections from House Democrats that did not have any Senate support.

The presiding officer opens and presents the certificates of the electoral votes in alphabetical order of the states.

The appointed “tellers” from the House and Senate, members of both parties, then read each certificate out loud and record and count the votes. At the end, the presiding officer announces who has won the majority votes for both president and vice president.

After a teller reads the certificate from any state, a lawmaker can stand up and object to that state’s vote on any grounds. But the presiding officer will not hear the objection unless it is in writing and signed by one-fifth of each chamber.

That threshold is significantly higher than what came before. Previously, a successful objection only required support from one member of the Senate and one member of the House. Lawmakers raised the threshold in the 2022 law to make objections more difficult.

If any objection reaches the threshold — something not expected this time — the joint session suspends and the House and Senate go into separate sessions to consider it. For the objection to be sustained, both chambers must uphold it by a simple majority vote. If they do not agree, the original electoral votes are counted with no changes.

In 2021, both the House and Senate rejected challenges to the electoral votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Before 2021, the last time that such an objection was considered had been 2005, when Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, both Democrats, objected to Ohio’s electoral votes, claiming there were voting irregularities. Both the House and Senate debated the objection and easily rejected it. It was only the second time such a vote had occurred.

After Congress certifies the vote, the president is inaugurated on the west front of the Capitol on Jan. 20.

The joint session is the last official chance for objections, beyond any challenges in court. Harris has conceded and never disputed Trump’s win.

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