An election result may have finally been called for Joe Biden, but with more than two months to go until the President-Elect is officially sworn in, the electoral process has only just begun.
The delay in a winner of the 2020 election being announced stemmed primarily from the unprecedented wealth of mail-in and absentee ballots cast as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
But while the counting of votes took longer than usual this year, it still came well under the parameters set by federal law, which only requires all votes to be tabulated by mid-December.
This is done to ensure that all vote-counting is completed in time for the next phase of the electoral process – the meeting of the electoral college.
The meeting of the electors traditionally takes place on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. This year that falls on 14 December.
The electors will meet in their respective states and cast their votes for president and vice-president on separate ballots.
The next step comes on 6 January, when these votes are then counted in a joint session of Congress.
Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, will preside over the count before announcing the results of the vote.
The electoral process will finally conclude on 20 January, when Mr Biden takes the Oath of Office and is officially sworn in as president of the United States.
What about the transfer of power?
US law maps out clear instructions for an orderly transfer of power from one president to the next, but Joe Biden's path is expected to be rockier than most of his modern-day predecessors.
A legal fight by President Donald Trump that triggers recounts of ballots in several US states could holdup many vital transition-related activities, as happened in 2000, when George W Bush wasn't declared the victor until five weeks after the election.
"A long legal battle would delay the transition, and that could be dangerous on the foreign policy front," said one Republican congressional source. "The world isn't standing still while we're all focused on the election."
With Democrat Biden having secured enough electoral votes to claim the presidency, there is concern that norm-breaker Trump could limit cooperation and make the typically staid process a messy affair.
On Saturday after major television networks called the election for Biden, Trump accused his rival of "rushing to falsely pose as the winner" but he did not provide evidence of anything inappropriate.
Foreign diplomats and other observers are girding for possible abrupt policy moves by the Republican president between now and 20 January inauguration day that could undercut the incoming administration when it will need to grapple quickly with the coronavirus pandemic and concurrent economic crisis.
The Presidential Transition Act, first passed in 1964, gives career civil servants significant power over the transfer of data and expertise to incoming officials, an arrangement meant to limit the risk of politicisation.
It is unclear whether Trump, who has refused to concede defeat, will abide by historic protocol and meet personally with his successor, as President Barack Obama did with Trump shortly after the 2016 election.
The transition process cannot shift into high gear until the government's General Services Administration (GSA) certifies the winner, and it said on Saturday it had not yet made a determination. Until then, the GSA can continue providing Biden's team with offices, computers and background checks for security clearances, but they cannot yet enter federal agencies.
Planning for the new administration
The Biden transition website - buildbackbetter.com – went live on Wednesday and even after declarations of his victory there was just a single page and no explanation of plans.
Jordan Strauss, a former White House official and now managing director of business intelligence at Kroll, a division of Duff & Phelps financial consultancy, said some 200 Biden people had been working for months to craft plans for the new administration.
Biden is expected to deploy hundreds of representatives across dozens of agencies in coming weeks to lay the groundwork for him to replace more than 4,000 Trump political appointees, the nucleus of a federal bureaucracy that controls an annual budget of more than $4.5 trillion.
Transition teams
Incumbent officials have leeway over how helpful they want to be, people involved in previous transitions said.
In 2016, then-President Obama directed his staff to "be professional" and cooperate with Trump's team. But turnover on Trump's transition staff and a reluctance to take materials prepared by Obama's aides marred the effort, multiple sources involved in the process said.
Political scientist Martha Joynt Kumar, author of a 2015 book on White House transitions, was upbeat about the resilience of the process this time. Trump officials so far have adhered to rules such as facilitating security clearances, Kumar said.
Chris Liddell, White House deputy chief of staff, and others involved in the transition, take their reputations seriously, she said, and a peaceful transfer of power remains a central tenet of the US system.
"To what extent are people going to want to participate at the end of the administration in blowing up relationships and institutions?" Kumar asked.
Biden's team is headed by Ted Kaufman, a longtime adviser appointed to fill out his term in the Senate after he was elected as Obama's vice president in 2008.
The legal framework, however, can't avert potential acrimony between the transition teams or prevent Trump from issuing executive orders and rules that Biden might oppose.
Kate Shaw and Michael Herz, law professors at Yeshiva University in New York, said the participation of career officials should limit the damage, but briefings on the handoff of intelligence and security data are overseen by the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist.
Shaw and Herz wrote in an essay in The Atlantic: "Plenty of things could still go wrong before noon on January 20."
Additional reporting Reuters
