U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will on Monday preside over Congress’ formal certification of the results of November’s presidential election, a race she lost to Donald Trump.

The day also marks the fourth anniversary of the riots at the U.S. Capitol, when Trump supporters tried to block the certification of Democratic President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Often, the occasion is just a formality.

Security was tight in Washington, D.C., and Biden vowed there would be no repeat of the violence on January 6, 2021, which left many dead.

As lawmakers meet in Washington, D.C., heavy snow forecast could cause havoc in the nation’s capital.

House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to proceed with the certification at 13:00 ET (18:00 GMT) regardless of the weather, telling Fox News: “Whether we’re in a snowstorm or not, we will Be in that room to make sure it gets done.”

On November 5, Trump defeated Harris in the national polls. As the current vice president, Harris must formally preside over the certification of results according to the U.S. Constitution.

Trump won all seven of the country’s battleground states, helping him to victory in the Electoral College, the mechanism that determines who becomes president. Harris’ job on Monday will be to read out the number of Electoral College votes each candidate won.

Trump’s second term will begin after he is inaugurated on January 20. For the first time since 2017, the president’s party will have a majority in both houses of Congress, albeit a slim one.

Trump’s victory marked a stunning political comeback after his 2020 election defeat and a criminal conviction in 2024 – a first for a current or former US president.

In the latest drama of the presidential campaign, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, grazing his ear with a bullet but Trump survived.

While leaving the White House, he faced a raft of legal cases against him, including a lawsuit over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he still disputes.

After his defeat that year, Trump and his allies made baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud, claiming the election was stolen from them.

Speaking in Washington, D.C., on Certification Day on January 6, 2021, Trump told the crowd to “fight like hell” but also asked them to make their voices heard “peacefully.”

He also tried to pressure his own vice president, Mike Pence, to reject the election results, but Pence rejected the call.

Rioters continued to breach barricades and ransack the Capitol until Trump finally intervened and told them to go home. The violence resulted in many deaths.

Trump’s promises upon returning to office include pardoning those convicted in connection with the attacks. He said many of them were “wrongfully imprisoned” but acknowledged that “some of them may have spiraled out of control”.

Instead, Biden called on Americans to never forget what happened.

“We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it,” Biden wrote in The Washington Post over the weekend.

For Trump’s own Republican Party, new Senate Majority Leader John Thune expressed a desire to move on, telling BBC US partner CBS News: “You Don’t just look in the rearview mirror.”