Confident in election results, Congress certified Trump win

Congress certified the results of the presidential election today with a state-by-state roll call that was over in 30 minutes—a stark contrast from four years ago.

Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, recalled how rioters breached the Capitol in 2021 just as members of Congress started to object to the election results.

“What was the first state we were going through and then everything started? It was Arizona—It was Gosar,” Nehls said, referring to Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who formally objected to the Arizona election results on the House floor. “Gosar was speaking, and then it started to get a little silly. I started thinking ‘something isn’t right here.’ And then they locked us all down.”

The lockdown lasted hours as protesters clashed violently with police. Congress reconvened finally at 9 p.m. that day to finish the certification.

Four years later, neither Nehls nor any other Republican lawmaker raised objections to the certification of November’s election results, even in the absence of major election reform measures that the GOP pushed for in 2024.

In 2020, 121 other Republicans joined Nehls in voting to block the certification of the election results because of concerns about voter fraud. While Republicans now say that their overall concerns about election integrity remain, they trust in 2024’s presidential vote.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said the results of the most recent election speak for themselves.

“I always say you gotta put enough points on the board they can’t steal it. And I think we put a lot of points on the board this time,” Burchett said.

President-elect Donald Trump swept seven swing states in 2024; Arizona, Georgia, Michigan Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—a stunning reversal from 2020, where, of that batch, Trump won only North Carolina.

In 2020, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin all were decided by 0.6 percent of the vote or less. This time, Trump took Arizona by 5%, Georgia by 2%, and Wisconsin by 1.4%

For a party that hasn’t won the popular vote since 2004, lawmakers like Burchett think that kind of outcome is beyond the pale of doubt.

But for other Republicans, the difference between the two elections is more procedural and structural. Nehls said he believes there were key irregularities present in 2020 that weren’t in the picture in 2024. In particular, he believes the widespread use of paper ballots introduced uncertainty across the board.

“[Democrats] don’t have COVID to fall back on,” Nehls said. “There was so much inconsistency there. Governors and mayors were making their own rules and maybe they felt they had the right to do it because of the emergency declaration—I mean we’ve never experienced that before. But when you have paper ballots, you’re going to have fraud.”

Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss., pointed out that last-minute changes introduced to accommodate COVID-19 regulations circumvented regular election operations.

“I can’t speak for other members but the reason I objected to the states that were challenged is that in those states we had the courts change election law to comply with some of the COVID restrictions that were in place,” Guest said. “You had courts that instructed county commissions not to check signatures, to allow votes that had been received after the deadline to be counted, they established drop boxes … none of that went through the legislative process.”

For election watchers like Katie Gorka, a national security analyst who served as a senior policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the previous Trump administration, many concerns about election integrity were alive and well just nine weeks ago.

She pointed to noncitizens who might have been on voter rolls in violation of federal law.

“The Fairfax, [Va.], GOP has an election integrity team that has been digging into this basically since the 2020 election,” Gorka told WORLD . “They discovered that the [Department of Motor Vehicles] was not sending document numbers to our Department of Elections. The Department of Elections was not verifying the citizenship status of these individuals. We actually think that there are probably tens of thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls.”

Asked about issues like that, Nehls, Burchett, and Guest all maintain that election security will still be a focus for the GOP in the 119th Congress, regardless of who won.

“If there’s one person who has a doubt about [election security] then we need to watch it,” Burchett said. “I think we need to enforce the law. When you have a justice system that is not enforcing the laws that are on the books … that’s a problem.”