A constitutional ritual that is normally a little-noticed curiosity will Monday turn into a symbol of the US political system’s durability while under assault from a defeated President seeking to overturn a democratic election.

Electors from 50 states and the District of Columbia will gather across the country to cast their ballots, which will confirm Joe Biden as the rightful 46th president and California Sen. Kamala Harris as vice president.

A moment of historic resonance will activate safeguards stemming from the founders’ fears nearly 250 years ago of a monarchical leader wielding unaccountable power to counter President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly spurned the fundamental principles of American democracy.

Earlier attempts by Trump to strong-arm local Republican lawmakers to produce delegations in swing states that would ignore the will of millions of voters and his election loss failed. So ballots cast Monday will confirm Biden will surpass the 270 electoral votes needed for victory. The ballots will be transmitted to Washington, DC, to be tallied in Congress on January 6, when a building — but almost certainly futile — rearguard by Republican lawmakers may expose a large rump of the party that has also turned against the democratic principles that underpin free and fair elections.

Despite the certainty of the constitutional choreography that will confirm Trump’s loss, several rebukes from the Supreme Court and multiple court losses, he refuses to accept reality and put the country first by accepting defeat.

“It’s not over … we’re going to continue to go forward,” Trump told Fox News in an interview recorded Saturday, before tweeting on Sunday that the nation’s top bench had “chickened out” by ruling Friday that Texas had no standing to file a case on his behalf.

Veteran Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg told CNN’s Ana Cabrera on Sunday that the blunt Supreme Court dismissals of Trump’s cases were “the briefest and most summary of dismissals possible. That is a signal in lawyer talk about ‘don’t waste our time with these theories that you are spouting out.’ “