TIME: As Key States Certify Their Results, Donald Trump’s Path to Challenge Election Results Rapidly Narrows

Michigan’s board of canvassers certified the state’s election results on Monday, throwing another roadblock in President Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to challenge the results of the 2020 election.

Republican member Norman D. Shinkle abstained in the board’s vote to certify the results. But his fellow Republican member Aaron Van Langevelde voted for certification, as did Democrats Jeannette Bradshaw and Julie Matuzak. With the 3-0 vote, the board certified the official results for President-elect Joe Biden on Monday afternoon, delivering him the state’s 16 electoral votes.

“As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men,’” said Van Langevelde before he cast his vote certifying the results. “This board needs to adhere to that principle here today and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”

Several other key swing states that delivered Biden his victory—including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona—are scheduled to certify their counts in the next few weeks, which will further narrow Trump’s path to challenge the election results. Certification works differently in each state, but with the same intention: to conduct an official review of results before sending a slate of electors who will then cast their votes in the Electoral College on Dec. 14.

Pennsylvania is expected to be one of next in line. Each county Board of Elections was required to send its certified results by Monday to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who will now certify the results herself. While Boockvar faces no firm deadline, “typically that happens fairly quickly,” says Suzanne Almeida, the elections advisor for the watchdog group Common Cause Pennsylvania. …

The Secretary of State doesn’t have a firm certification deadline, “so we have plenty of time,” explains Almeida of Common Cause Pennsylvania. “This is just logistically complicated… and sometimes [it] stretches on past the deadline.” It’s not unprecedented to have a handful of counties missing the Nov. 23 deadline, she says, and none are large enough that their results would flip the outcome.

Almeida says it’s also currently unclear if counties involved in pending litigation can certify results, but only Allegheny and Philadelphia County are in that position. Those suits concern a handful of votes that wouldn’t impact Biden’s decisive margin of over 80,000, she adds.