Two battleground states, Wisconsin and Arizona, certified their presidential election results Monday in favor of Joe Biden, even as President Donald Trump's legal team continued to dispute the results.
Biden's victory in Wisconsin was certified after a partial recount that only added to his 20,600-vote margin over Trump, who has promised to file a lawsuit seeking to undo the results.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed a certificate that completed the process after the canvass report showing Biden as the winner after the recount was approved by the chairwoman of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission. Evers' signature was required by law and is typically a procedural step that receives little attention.
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"Today I carried out my duty to certify the November 3rd election," Evers said in a statement. "I want to thank our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers across our state for working tirelessly to ensure we had a safe, fair, and efficient election. Thank you for all your good work."
The action Monday now starts a five-day deadline for Trump to file a lawsuit, which he promised would come no later than today. Trump is mounting an attempt to overturn the results by disqualifying as many as 238,000 ballots. Trump's attorneys have alleged that there was widespread fraud and illegal activity.
Biden's campaign has said the recount showed that Biden won Wisconsin decisively and there was no fraud. Even if Trump were successful in Wisconsin, the state's 10 Electoral College votes would not be enough to undo Biden's overall victory as states around the country certify results.
Earlier Monday, Arizona officials certified Biden's narrow victory in that state.
Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey both vouched for the integrity of the election before signing off on the results.
"We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong," Ducey said.
He did not directly address Trump's claims of irregularities but said the state pulled off a successful election with a mix of in-person and mail voting despite the pandemic.
Hobbs said Arizona voters should know that the election "was conducted with transparency, accuracy and fairness in accordance with Arizona's laws and election procedures, despite numerous unfounded claims to the contrary."
Biden is only the second Democrat in 70 years to win Arizona. In the final tally, he beat Trump by 10,457 votes, or 0.3% of the nearly 3.4 million ballots cast.
The certification paves the way not only for Biden to receive the state's 11 electoral votes but also for Democrat Mark Kelly to join the U.S. Senate. Kelly, who defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally in a special election Nov. 3, is expected to be sworn in Wednesday.
GIULIANI OBJECTS
Even as Hobbs, Ducey, the state attorney general and chief justice of the state Supreme Court certified the election results, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis met in a Phoenix hotel ballroom a few miles away to lay out claims of irregularities in the vote count in Arizona and elsewhere. But they did not provide evidence of widespread fraud.
"The officials certifying have made no effort to find out the truth, which to me, gives the state Legislature the perfect reason to take over the conduct of this election because it's being conducted irresponsibly and unfairly," Giuliani said.
Nine Republican state lawmakers attended the meeting. They had requested permission to hold a formal legislative hearing at the Capitol but were denied by the Republican House speaker and Senate president.
Trump berated Ducey on Twitter Monday night, asking, "Why is he rushing to put a Democrat in office, especially when so many horrible things concerning voter fraud are being revealed at the hearing going on right now."
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Elections challenges brought by the Trump campaign or his backers in key battleground states have largely been unsuccessful as Trump continues to allege voter fraud while refusing to concede.
Arizona and Wisconsin are the last contested battleground states to make their presidential election results official. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada certified Biden's victories last week, and Georgia made his win there official on Nov. 20.
The U.S. General Services Administration has acknowledged Biden as the apparent winner and the president called on his agencies to cooperate. That designation triggered a formal transition process, giving the president-elect and his team access to agency officials, briefing books and other government resources, including some $6 million in funding.
BRIEFINGS START
Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris began receiving the nation's most sensitive secrets Monday as they prepare to assume office on Jan 20.
The pair received the highly classified Presidential Daily Brief, a summary of the most important information collected across the U.S. intelligence community that is prepared and delivered by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Trump approved the briefings for Biden a week ago, a day after his administration approved the formal transition process to his successor.
Biden had access to the Presidential Daily Brief in Wilmington, Del. Harris received it in a secure room at the Commerce Department, where the presidential transition offices are located.
The Presidential Daily Brief is just one component of the intelligence briefings presented to an incoming administration. Biden and Harris will also be able to receive in-depth subject matter briefings from intelligence experts, as well as a run-down of extremely classified covert operations underway during the Trump administration, the latter necessary to determine if they want to maintain or modify those operations once they assume office.
ECONOMIC ADVISERS PICKED
Additionally, Biden formally announced his top economic advisers Monday, choosing a team that is stocked with champions of organized labor and marginalized workers, signaling an early focus on efforts to speed and spread the gains of the recovery from the pandemic recession.
The selections build on a pledge Biden made to business groups two weeks ago, when he said labor unions would have "increased power" in his administration. They suggest that Biden's team will be focused initially on increased federal spending to reduce unemployment and an expanded safety net to cushion households that have continued to suffer as the coronavirus persists and the recovery slows.
In a sign that Biden plans to focus on spreading economic wealth, his transition team put issues of equality and worker empowerment at the forefront of its news release announcing the nominees, saying they would help create "an economy that gives every single person across America a fair shot and an equal chance to get ahead."
Biden's picks include Janet Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chairwoman, as Treasury secretary; Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University, to head the White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress think tank, to run the Office of Management and Budget. All three have focused on efforts to increase worker earnings and reduce racial and gender discrimination in the economy.
Tanden said in February that rising income inequality was the consequence of "decades of conservative attacks on workers' right to organize," and labor unions "are a powerful vehicle to move workers into the middle class and keep them there."
The two other nominees to Biden's Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, are economists who have pushed for policies to advance workers and labor rights, and who advised Biden in his campaign as he built an agenda that featured several long-standing goals of organized labor, such as raising the federal minimum wage and strengthening "Buy America" requirements in federal contracting.
William Spriggs, chief economist for the AFL-CIO labor union, hailed the selections, saying in an email Monday that "we have not had a CEA as focused on the role of fiscal policy and full employment since President Johnson."
Biden also named Adewale Adeyemo, a senior international economic adviser in the Obama administration, as deputy Treasury secretary.
The nominees, who require Senate confirmation, will be introduced today. Another of Biden's picks, former Obama adviser Brian Deese, has been tapped to lead the National Economic Council but was not included in Monday's announcement.
Biden's team includes several labor economists, including Yellen, who has been a longtime champion of workers and has at times suggested allowing the unemployment rate to run low for a longer period of time without worrying about inflation -- an idea some economists thought imprudent but which has since become more widely accepted. While at the Fed, she balanced her preference for a strong labor market with inflation concerns and political constraints.
Information for this article was contributed by Scott Bauer, Jonathan J. Cooper, Terry Tang, Zeke Miller and Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press; by Mark Niquette and Amanda Albright of Bloomberg News; by Emma Brown of The Washington Post; and by Jim Tankersley, Jeanna Smialek and Alan Rappeport of The New York Times.
