Georgia’s secretary of state announced Tuesday afternoon that the runoff elections have been officially certified, clearing the way for Sens.-Elect Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Raphael Warnock (D-GA) to be sworn in on Wednesday.
Georgia technically had until Friday to complete the certification, keeping the timing of the swearing-in ceremony in flux.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R) quickly signed the paperwork, which will be delivered to Washington D.C., according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The senators-elect will be sworn in Wednesday evening, along with Alex Padilla who was appointed to fill Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris’ (D-CA) seat. Both Ossoff and Warnock have confirmed that they will be sworn in around 4:30 pm E.T.
Ossoff and Warnock pulled off a shocking double-header victory in early January, gifting President-Elect Joe Biden effective Democratic control of both chambers of Congress.
Republican incumbents Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and David Perdue (R-GA) both conceded without contesting the results of the election after both races finished outside of recount range.
Plans are still being made about how to run a 50-50 Senate, a historical rarity that last happened in 2001. When reporters asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Tuesday if he intended to follow the framework established then, he was noncommittal.
“I’m talking to McConnell later we’ll see what happens,” he said, according to the Hill pool.
After the hotly contested 2000 election, then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) struck a power-sharing deal with Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-MI) to govern the evenly split Senate.
They agreed to fill committees with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, and both parties got the same staff resources. Republicans, who had the edge when Bush got to the White House, kept the chairmanships and power to convene the committees for hearings and markups.
The two acknowledged the more difficult and uncharted waters Schumer and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are navigating this time, and laid out a checklist of what they must figure out to have an operational chamber in a recent Washington Post piece.
This article has been updated.
