They were trying to stop a purely ceremonial counting of the electoral votes.
Spoiler alert: they delayed it one day. January 6 electoral vote count and protest news
America has a very weird electoral process, owing to the fact that we originally saw ourselves as 13 independent nations in a union, as opposed to a single nation divided into 50 parts. One of these oddities is that the president is determined by 50 separate state elections, whose results are tallied up a few weeks later. And even though we’ve known the final results since December, Congress was meeting yesterday to tally the votes.
The problem is that Trump has spent the last month claiming that the election was rigged and that he was the actual winner. Never-mind the absurdity of the opposition party somehow rigging an election. And Trump and his supporters were holding a protest against the electoral votes being counted.
Now anyone with an ounce of sense would have realized how silly Trump’s claims are, even if they had voted for Trump themselves. Which means that anyone who showed up genuinely believed that the election had been rigged, and wanted Trump to be president badly enough to do something about it.
So they tried to interrupt the tally. Capitol Police weren’t prepared for them, because who would be stupid enough to storm the Capitol Building? And the mob manages to make it inside, forcing Congress to evacuate.
Final result, one rioter dead, several officers injured, and now the entirety of Congress is pissed off at Trump for incitement.
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