Why President-elect Trump has to wait for his inauguration

It has been over two months since Donald Trump‘s election victory, but he won’t become president until January 20. The reason for the long wait? A quirk of history.

Like many aspects of American political life, the November-to-January timeline from election to inauguration outlined in the US Constitution has its roots in historic logistics.

It “is somewhat of a historical artifact,” Michael Berkman, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University in the United States, told DW.

For over a century, the United States waited until March to inaugurate its president, potentially leaving an administration that was voted out in charge for another four months.

That changed in 1933, with the ratification of the 20th amendment to the US Constitution, during the height of the Great Depression, which moved Inauguration Day from March 4 to January 20.

Vice president role has changed

At the time, the country was experiencing 25% unemployment, the highest in recorded US history.

Freshly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt was waiting to enter office while incumbent Herbert Hoover was “all but out of the White House,” wrote Matt Dallek, a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University in the US, in an email to DW.

The move was made “to limit the chances of chaos, instability and a leaderless government,” he said.

Before this change, the March inauguration also served a logistical purpose.

“[It] took a long time to come to New York for the inauguration from the original 13 states,” Berkman said, referring to the 13 colonies that existed when the US Constitution was founded in 1789.

Travel time to the US center of government, at that time located in New York City, played a big role in how the entire government and its processes were designed, he explained.

Certification of election results

Unlike other countries with centralized election commissions overseeing the process of deciding a new national government, each of the 50 states administers the conduct of the US presidential election in their own borders.

This results in a patchwork of rules and processes and means vote-counting can happen quickly in some places or be far slower in others.

It’s why the projection of a winner has historically fallen to media observers, even though such declarations are unofficial.

After election night, the certification process begins.

This involves tasks such as examining ballots that were rejected by voting machines, counting ballots that arrived after the official election — from US citizens living abroad, for example — and handling any conflicts related to the counting of the votes within the state or its municipalities.

The 2000 election between Al Gore and former US President George Bush offers an example of one of these disputes.

The Gore campaign asked for a recount of the votes in Florida. After multiple court cases at the state level, the Supreme Court ruled against the request on December 9, 2000.

Trump’s team started dozens of legal proceedings in 2020, though only one dispute was upheld and had no bearing on Biden‘s election victory.

But it’s for these reasons that the time gap between election and inauguration has its uses.

Vice President Kamala Harris approved her own defeat

After any disputes are settled and results are counted, they are sent to be certified by each state’s governor.

Unlike most other countries, US presidents are not elected by a majority population vote but by electors from the US Electoral College.

When citizens vote in the US presidential election, they are not actually voting for the president but rather to instruct the state’s electors which presidential candidate to endorse.

For 48 states and the District of Columbia (Washington D.C.) a “winner-takes-all” approach exists. In effect, which ever candidate wins most of that state’s popular vote will win all the state’s electoral votes.

Only Maine and Nebraska stray from this system – granting two electoral votes to the state’s popular victor, and the remainder to the majority winner in each congressional voting district.

These electors meet to cast the state’s official electoral votes in mid-December. Their answers are sent to Congress.

Congress met on January 6 to count the electoral votes they have received from the 50 US states and District of Columbia.

The US Vice President presides over the certification and announces the new president.

That means Kamala Harris oversaw the certification of her defeat — an ignominious honor shared only with Democrat Al Gore in 2001 and Republican Richard Nixon in 1960.

Joe Biden and the “lame-duck” presidency

When an incumbent president is defeated or did not contest an election, the two-and-a-half months between an election and inauguration is sometimes referred to as the “lame-duck” period.

This is the period where the outgoing and incoming presidents are meant to work together to ensure the peaceful transfer of power, a convention Trump transgressed four years ago when he incited the January 6 riots.

It’s also the final chance for a president to implement the final actions of their premiership.

During his lame-duck period, Joe Biden has handed out a series of presidential pardons (including of his own son) and presented his final civil awards.

He’s also extended policy measures, locking up almost a million square miles of US offshore waters from oil and gas drilling — a spanner in the works for Trump’s promise to “drill, drill, drill” when he takes the presidency — and blocked a takeover bid for US Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel.

Sometimes, a president in their second and constitutionally final term of office is considered a lame-duck on day one — that would apply to Trump this time around, as it did during for Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him.

This article was originally published on November 6, updated to reflect Donald Trump’s election victory and the certification of results before his presidential inauguration.

Edited by: Matt Pearson