Republican Donald Trump prevailed in Electoral College voting on Monday to officially win election as the next president, easily dashing long-shot hopes by a small movement of detractors to block him from gaining the White House.

Trump garnered more than the 270 electoral votes required to win, even as at least half a dozen U.S. electors broke with tradition to vote against their own state’s directives, the largest number of “faithless electors” seen in more than a century.

A core of Democratic activists around the country had hoped to convince Republicans to cross lines and vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who won the nationwide popular vote on Nov. 8.

In the end, however, more Democrats than Republicans split with their party. Four Democratic electors voted for someone other than Clinton, while two Republicans turned their backs on Trump.

Bret Chiafalo, 38, of Everett, Washington, was one of three electors from his state to vote for Colin Powell, a former Republican secretary of state, rather than Clinton, saying he believed Powell was better suited for the job than Trump.

The founding fathers “said the Electoral College was not to elect a demagogue, was not to elect someone influenced by foreign powers, was not to elect someone who is unfit for office. Trump fails on all three counts, unlike any candidate we’ve ever seen in American history,” Chiafalo said in an interview.

With nearly all votes counted, Trump had clinched 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 224, according to an Associated Press tally of the voting by 538 electors across the country.

“I will work hard to unite our country and be the president of all Americans,” Trump said in a statement released by his transition team in response to the Electoral College outcome.

The Electoral College assigns each state electors equal to its number of representatives and senators in Congress. The District of Columbia also has three electoral votes.

When voters go to the polls to cast a ballot for president, they are actually choosing a presidential candidate’s preferred slate of electors for their state. </s> WASHINGTON: America’s Electoral College on Monday confirmed Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States, unswayed by a desperate bid by die-hard opponents to bar the Republican’s path to the White House.

Six weeks after his upset victory over the Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump sailed as expected past the 270 votes needed to make his victory official according to US media, clearing the way for him to succeed Barack Obama on January 20.

“We did it!” the 70-year-old billionaire tweeted after the results came in. “Thank you to all of my great supporters, we just officially won the election (despite all of the distorted and inaccurate media).”

In a statement released by his team, the president-elect welcomed the “overwhelming vote” in his favor, while reaching out to the Democrats who sought against the odds to block him.

“With this historic step we can look forward to the bright future ahead,” he said. “I will work hard to unite our country and be the president of all Americans.”

Under normal circumstances, the college vote is a little-watched, rubber stamp formality in which electors — most of them party members — officially cast ballots for the candidate that won the popular tally in their state.

This time, however, the divisive nature of the campaign, Trump’s provocative personality, and Clinton’s lead of nearly three million votes in the popular tally combined to raise the stakes.

The Electoral College vote works like this: when US voters cast ballots on November 8, they did not directly elect the president but rather 538 electors charged with translating their wishes into reality.

Democratic activists casting the Republican as a threat to the nation staged a vocal, weeks-long campaign urging electors to break ranks and refuse to vote for him.

To bar Trump’s road to the White House, they needed to convince at least 37 Republican electors to abandon their candidate.

The odds of that happening were considered next to none.

According to a New York Times tally, a total of seven so-called “faithless” electors defected for someone else than their party’s nominee, the biggest number ever.

In Washington state, three of the state’s 12 electoral votes went to former Republican secretary of state Colin Powell and a fourth went to Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American leader who helped block the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

An elector in Hawaii cast a vote for Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primaries. Two Texas Republican electors defected, one voting for former representative Ron Paul and another for Ohio Governor John Kasich.

One Texas Republican elector, Christopher Suprun, had publicly said he would not vote for Trump, arguing he is unqualified to be president for reasons including conflicts of interest created by his vast overseas business holdings.

Suprun says he received death threats as a result.

An online petition urging electors to reject Trump collected some five million supporters. Hollywood stars including Martin Sheen recently released a video to goad electors to dump Trump.

Undeterred by their outside chance of success, protesters rallied Monday at statehouses from Pennsylvania to Texas to Utah as electors gathered across the country to cast their votes.

In Wisconsin, where Trump carried a thin margin that was key to propelling him into the Oval Office, a few protesters chanted “Shame!” as the state’s 10 electoral votes for Trump were announced, the Times reported.

“I feel the fate of our nation is at stake here,” protester Ray-Ellen Kavey, 68, told The Washington Post outside the capitol building of the Rust Belt state of Pennsylvania.

“I know nothing will come of this, but my conscience won’t let me do any less.”

In New York, former president Bill Clinton cast one of the state’s 29 electoral votes for his wife.

“I’ve never cast a vote I was prouder of,” he was quoted as saying by the Post.

The Republican National Committee welcomed the result — and urged Democrats to accept Trump’s victory once and for all.

“This historic election is now officially over,” RNC co-chair Sharon Day said in a statement. “For the good of the country, Democrats must stop their cynical attempts to undermine the legitimacy of this election.”

The anti-Trump movement gained further momentum in recent days amid the uproar over allegations of Russian hacking aimed at swaying the vote in favor of the Republican.

Even in the unlikely event that Trump had lost the Electoral College vote, it would have been up to the House of Representatives — controlled by Republicans — to designate the successor to President Barack Obama.

The final vote result will be formally announced in the US Congress on January 6, two weeks before the next president is to be inaugurated. AFP </s> The President-elect Donald Trump has surpassed the necessary 270 votes in the Electoral College.

Trump cruised to victory in the Electoral College despite thousands of protesters who converged on state capitols across the country.

The Electoral College results will be officially certified on January 6 during a joint session of Congress.

Protesters called for electors to “vote your conscience” outside various state houses where each state’s November election results were being authenticated.

Around 5:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Trump reached his 270th Electoral College vote, according to the Associated Press. Texas put Trump past the threshold, with 36 of its 38 electors voting for him to reflect the results of the state’s November election results.

Two “faithless” electors in the Texas delegation voted for former Texas Congressman Ron Paul and Ohio Governor John Kasich, both Republicans.

Ahead of Monday’s vote, 306 electors were anticipated to vote for Trump, while the other 232 were pledged to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. </s> WASHINGTON — And you thought Election Day was in November.

Electors are set to gather in every state on Monday to formally elect Donald Trump president even as anti-Trump forces try one last time to deny him the White House.

Protests are planned for state capitals, but they are unlikely to persuade the Electoral College to dump Trump. An Associated Press survey of electors found very little appetite to vote for alternative candidates.

Republican electors say they have been deluged with emails, phone calls and letters urging them not to support Trump. Many of the emails are part of coordinated campaigns.

“The letters are actually quite sad,” said Lee Green, a Republican elector from North Carolina. “They are generally freaked out. They honestly believe the propaganda. They believe our nation is being taken over by a dark and malevolent force.”

Wirt A. Yerger Jr., a Republican elector in Mississippi, said, “I have gotten several thousand emails asking me not to vote for Trump. I threw them all away.”

A joint session of Congress is scheduled for Jan. 6 to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, with Vice President Joe Biden presiding as president of the Senate. Once the result is certified, the winner — likely Trump — will be sworn in on Jan. 20.

The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was a compromise between those who wanted popular elections for president and those who wanted no public input.

The Electoral College has 538 members, with the number allocated to each state based on how many representatives it has in the House plus one for each senator. The District of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.

To be elected president, the winner must get at least half plus one — or 270 electoral votes. Most states give all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins that state’s popular vote. Maine and Nebraska award them by congressional district.

The AP tried to reach all of the electors and interviewed more than 330 of them, finding widespread aggravation among Democrats with the electoral process, but little expectation Trump would be derailed.

Some Democrats have argued that the Electoral College is undemocratic because it gives more weight to less populated states. That is how Hillary Clinton, who got more than 2.6 million more votes nationwide, lost the election to Trump. Some have also tried to dissuade Trump voters by arguing that he is unsuited to the job. Others cite the CIA’s assessment that Russia engaged in computer hacking to sway the election in favor of the Republican.
• White House suggests Putin was involved in US hacking, Obama vows retaliation
• In farewell, John Kline lets loose — a little — on Donald Trump, Congress and what’s next
• Trump, backers ask courts to halt or block 3 state recounts

“When the founders of our country created (the Electoral College) 200-plus years ago, they didn’t have confidence in the average white man who had property, because that’s who got to vote,” said Shawn Terris, a Democratic elector from Ventura, California. “It just seems so undemocratic to me that people other than the voters get to choose who leads the country.”

But despite the national group therapy session being conducted by some Democrats, only one Republican elector told the AP that he will not vote for Trump.

There is no constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote for the candidate who won their state. Some states require their electors to vote for the winning candidate, either by law or through signed pledges. But no elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged, according to the National Archives.

Those laws are rarely tested. More than 99 percent of electors through U.S. history have voted for the candidate who won their state.

Electors are selected by state parties, and so are often insiders who can be trusted to vote for the party’s candidate. Many Republican electors said they feel duty-bound to honor their pledge to vote for the candidate who won their state, regardless of how they feel about Trump.

Still, some anti-Trump activists have been getting creative in trying to persuade electors to dump Trump.

In addition to thousands of emails, Republican elector Charlie Buckels of Louisiana said he received a FedEx package with a 50-page document that the sender said “had absolute proof that the Russians hacked the elections.”

“From the tenor of these emails, you would think these people are curled up in a corner in a fetal position with a thumb in their mouth,” Buckels said.

 ———

 Associated Press writers Hope Yen in Washington, Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi, Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Juliet A. Williams in Sacramento, California contributed to this report. </s> (CNN) Donald Trump surpassed the necessary 270 votes in the Electoral College on Monday, taking the next step in the official process to become President.

Trump received 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 227. Seven "faithless" electors voted for other candidates, costing Trump two votes and Clinton four. Hawaii's votes -- three for Clinton and one breaking from the state's results and supporting Bernie Sanders -- were the last to be counted.

The results mean Trump -- who lost the popular vote by more than 2 percentage points to Clinton -- easily staved off a long-shot bid by opponents to turn Republican electors against him.

The Electoral College results will be officially certified January 6 during a joint session of Congress.

"This election represents a movement that millions of hard working men and women all across the country stood behind and made possible. With this historic step we can look forward to the bright future ahead. I will work hard to unite our country and be the president of all Americans. Together, we will make America great again," Trump said in a statement.

He also claimed his win was "a historic electoral landslide victory in our nation's democracy," though Clinton actually won the popular vote by about 3 million ballots nationwide making Trump the worst-performing winner in the popular vote since 1876.

Trump was put over the top by electors in Texas. Thirty-six of the state's 38 went for Trump, while two ignored the state's Election Day results. One voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and one backed former Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

The first response from Trump's camp came from Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who tweeted: "Congratulations to @RealDonaldTrump; officially elected President of the United States today by the Electoral College!"

Pence also wrote, "I'm honored & humbled to be officially elected today as the next Vice President of the United States of America by the Electoral College."

In Washington state, four electors opted for other candidates, instead of backing Hillary Clinton. Three cast ballots for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and one backed Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American activist who's been involved in the North Dakota pipeline fight.

Those Washington electors also picked a mixed bag for the vice presidency. One voted for home-state Sen. Maria Cantwell. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine each got votes, as well. And one went to activist Winona LaDuke, Ralph Nader's running mate as the 2000 Green Party nominee for vice president.

This is the first US presidential election since 1872 with more than one "faithless elector."

Former President Bill Clinton cast his ballot for his wife as an elector in the state of New York.

"As an elector from my home state of New York, I've never been more proud to cast a vote than my vote today for @HillaryClinton," he tweeted.

When all the votes were counted in November, the President-elect won 306 electoral votes to Clinton's 232. Some have since called on electors to vote against their state results, after Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots nationwide.

The 538 men and women voted primarily in accordance with the results from November in their state. The electors, chosen by state parties of the candidate who carried each state, convened in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia.

While electors are technically chosen to independently cast their ballots for president, both precedent and, in most cases, state laws require them to abide by the people's vote in each state.

After a fraught election, some have called on electors to vote against their state results.

In Minnesota, one elector was disqualified after declaring he would vote for someone other than his state's winner, Clinton. Under state law, he was replaced, and the alternate voted for Clinton.

Protests had popped up around the country Monday as frustrated Americans sought one last opportunity to stop the candidate they opposed.

But mass defections of electors was always extremely unlikely.

Thirty-seven of Trump's pledged 306 electors would have had to vote against him, becoming so-called "faithless electors," to keep him under the 270 threshold to become President. If Clinton were to reach 270 in that far-fetched scenario, she could have become President. If no candidate reached 270, the House of Representatives would have held a vote when Congress reconvenes in January.

There have been a handful faithless electors in past cycles, though never enough to change the outcome of the race.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, whose state was won by Trump, tweeted a picture of the ballot for electors in his state. It featured a ballot for Trump as President and Mike Pence as vice president.

Elsewhere in the country, Americans protested near electoral voting sites in a last-ditch plea to stop Trump's election, despite the high unlikelihood of success.

In Tallahassee, Florida, protestors began gathering before 10 a.m. outside of the Senate Chamber entrance on the fourth floor of the Florida State Capitol. Asked if he actually expected any outcome other than 29 votes for Trump, Democracy Spring's Maxwell Frost sighed. "I'm hoping for the best," he said. "We'll see what happens."

While Trump has claimed he won in a landslide victory, that description is inaccurate. He is expected to garner just 56.9% of the electoral vote, assuming all electors vote according to their states' results. That will give Trump the 44th-largest share of the electoral vote out of 54 presidential elections since the modern system started in 1804.

The electoral votes will be officially counted on January 6, when Congress returns. Vice President Joe Biden will preside over the count.

Lawmakers can technically object -- in writing, with objections signed by at least one House and one Senate member -- to individual electoral votes or entire states' results. If the House and Senate support that objection, the vote or votes in question are thrown out. But that has never happened.

Trump will be officially set for his inauguration at noon on January 20 once all the electoral votes are counted. </s> WASHINGTON — Donald Trump started racking up electoral votes Monday even as anti-Trump protesters across the country tried to persuade the Electoral College to prevent him from winning the White House.

With about half the states reporting, neither Trump nor Democrat Hillary Clinton had lost any electors.

Trump had 154 votes and Clinton had 86. It takes 270 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency. Electors were voting throughout the day and there was scant evidence many GOP electors would peel away from their Election Day winner. More than three dozen would have to abandon him to complicate his path to the presidency.

More than 200 demonstrators braved freezing temperatures at Pennsylvania’s capitol, chanting, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!” and “No treason, no Trump!”

Protesters also gathered in Colorado, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Nebraska and other states.

The protesters, however, were unlikely to persuade the Electoral College to dump Trump. An Associated Press survey of electors found very little appetite to vote for alternative candidates. Only one Republican said he would vote for someone else.

Republican electors have been deluged with emails, phone calls and letters urging them not to support Trump. Many of the emails are part of coordinated campaigns.

“The letters are actually quite sad,” said Lee Green, a Republican elector from North Carolina. “They are generally freaked out. They honestly believe the propaganda. They believe our nation is being taken over by a dark and malevolent force.”

Wirt A. Yerger Jr., a Republican elector in Mississippi, said, “I have gotten several thousand emails asking me not to vote for Trump. I threw them all away.”

A joint session of Congress is scheduled for Jan. 6 to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, with Vice President Joe Biden presiding as president of the Senate. Once the result is certified, the winner — almost certainly Trump — will be sworn in on Jan. 20.

The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was a compromise between those who wanted popular elections for president and those who wanted no public input.

The Electoral College has 538 members, with the number allocated to each state based on how many representatives it has in the House plus one for each senator. The District of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.

The AP tried to reach all of the electors and interviewed more than 330 of them, finding widespread aggravation among Democrats with the electoral process, but little expectation Trump would be derailed.

Some Democrats have argued that the Electoral College is undemocratic because it gives more weight to less populated states. That is how Clinton, who got more than 2.6 million more votes nationwide, lost the election to Trump. Some have also tried to dissuade Trump voters by arguing that he is unsuited to the job. Others cite the CIA’s assessment that Russia engaged in computer hacking to sway the election in favor of the Republican.

“When the founders of our country created (the Electoral College) 200-plus years ago, they didn’t have confidence in the average white man who had property, because that’s who got to vote,” said Shawn Terris, a Democratic elector from Ventura, California. “It just seems so undemocratic to me that people other than the voters get to choose who leads the country.”

There is no constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote for the candidate who won their state. Some states require their electors to vote for the winning candidate, either by law or through signed pledges. But no elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged, according to the National Archives.

Those laws are rarely tested. More than 99 percent of electors through U.S. history have voted for the candidate who won their state.

Electors are selected by state parties, and so are often insiders who can be trusted to vote for the party’s candidate. Many Republican electors said they feel duty-bound to honor their pledge to vote for the candidate who won their state, regardless of how they feel about Trump.

Still, some anti-Trump activists have been getting creative in trying to persuade electors to dump Trump.

In addition to thousands of emails, Republican elector Charlie Buckels of Louisiana said he received a FedEx package with a 50-page document that the sender said “had absolute proof that the Russians hacked the elections.”

“From the tenor of these emails, you would think these people are curled up in a corner in a fetal position with a thumb in their mouth,” Buckels said.

Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, Hope Yen in Washington, Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi, Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Juliet A. Williams in Sacramento, California contributed to this report. </s> WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The Electoral College voting to legally elect the US president went off without any upsets on Monday, despite reports that many Republican electors would defect to deny President-elect Donald Trump a majority.



Surprisingly, it was Trump's Democrat rival Hillary Clinton who lost more votes Monday than that from Trump's ballot box.



Trump secured 304 votes, compared with 227 for Hillary.



In the presidential election held on November 8, Trump had won 306 electoral college votes against Hillary, who got 232 votes.



Eight Democratic electors attempted to vote against Clinton, but three of them were replaced by state election officials, raising doubts if their 'faithless' votes will count. 



Clinton had won the popular vote with a lead of more than 2.8 million votes.



To win the presidency, a candidate needs 270 electoral votes. 



On the eve of the vote, reports emerged that an anti-Trump electoral revolt could deny the President-elect a majority, for which at least 37 GOP electors needed to defect.



Just two of the 306 GOP electors, both from Texas, cast their vote against Trump defying a Republican National Committee whip.



'We just officially won the election despite all of the distorted and inaccurate media,' Trump said on Twitter.



On January 6, Congress will officially count the electoral votes presided over by Vice President Joe Biden, and the results are final.



The President-elect's inauguration is to take place on January 20.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX </s> PALM BEACH, Fla./WASHINGTON - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said without evidence in a tweet on Sunday that he won the popular vote in the Nov. 8 election "if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

The allegation by Trump, who won the required votes in the Electoral College to secure the presidency, comes as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote over Trump has surpassed 2 million votes and is expected to grow to more than 2.5 million as ballots in populous states such as California continue to be tallied.

Clinton's legal team said on Saturday it had agreed to participate in a recount of Wisconsin votes after the state's election board approved the effort requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, which Trump has called "ridiculous."

"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," the Republican Trump tweeted as reporters waited for him to leave his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida to fly back to his residence in New York City.

The U.S. presidential race is decided by the Electoral College, based on a tally of wins from the state-by-state contests, rather than by the national vote. Trump has surpassed the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. The Electoral College results are expected to be finalized on Dec. 19. Trump takes office on Jan. 20.

"It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than in the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4 states instead of the 15 states that I visited," Trump added in follow-up tweets.

Before the election, Trump made unsubstantiated allegations that the results of the election might be "rigged" against him.

Since the vote, his message has alternated between appealing for unity and railing against his opponents and the media.

In a video message released ahead of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, Trump said he hoped it would be a time for Americans "to begin to heal our divisions" following a "long and bruising political campaign."

Trump has derided the fundraising effort by Stein to launch recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as a "scam." Those states had voted Democratic in recent presidential elections but all broke narrowly for the Republican Trump in this month's election. The recounts are not expected to change the results of the election.

Stein, who won about 1 percent of the national vote, has said she wants a recount to guarantee the integrity of the U.S. voting system, a push that came after some experts raised the possibility that hacks could have affected the results.

Democratic President Barack Obama's administration has said there is no evidence of electoral tampering, but experts have said that the only way to verify the results are accurate is to conduct a recount. </s> WASHINGTON -- There were many protesters but few faithless electors as Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote Monday -- ensuring he will become America's 45th president.

An effort by anti-Trump forces to persuade Republican electors to abandon the president-elect came to practically nothing, and the process unfolded largely according to its traditions. Trump's victory Nov. 8 and the fact Democrat Hillary Clinton had won the national popular vote had stirred an intense lobbying effort, but to no avail.

The effort injected more anger and partisanship into the already divisive 2016 presidential campaign.

"We did it!" Trump tweeted Monday evening. "Thank you to all of my great supporters, we just officially won the election (despite all of the distorted and inaccurate media)."

[TRUMP: Timeline of president-elect’s career + list of appointments so far]

Even one of Trump's fiercest Republican rivals, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, said it was time to get behind the president-elect.

"We want unity, we want love," Kasich said as Ohio's electors voted to back Trump at a Statehouse ceremony. Kasich refused to endorse or vote for Trump in the election.

Trump had 304 votes and Clinton had 227. It takes 270 Electoral College votes to win the presidency. Texas put Trump over the top despite two Republican electors casting protest votes.

Befitting an election filled with acrimony, thousands of protesters converged on state capitols across the country Monday, urging Republican electors to abandon their party's winning candidate.

More than 200 demonstrators braved freezing temperatures at Pennsylvania's Capitol, chanting, "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!" and "No treason, no Trump!"

In Madison, Wis., protesters shouted, cried and sang "Silent Night." In Augusta, Maine, they banged on drums and held signs that said, "Don't let Putin Pick Our President," referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In Harrisburg, Pa., Ray-Ellen Kavey, 68, said he had driven from neighboring New York state to try to persuade Pennsylvania's electors to switch allegiance.

"I think the Constitution charges the electors with preventing exactly what is happening here -- a hostile takeover of our government by a bigot who has been supported by Russia," Kavey said. "I know nothing will come of this, but my conscience won't let me do any less."

Despite the noise outside state capitols, inside, the voting went mostly as planned.

In Nashville, Tenn., one audience member tried to read out some Scripture before the ballots were cast, but was told that he could not speak.

"We certainly appreciate the Scripture," state Election Coordinator Mark Goins said from the podium. "The answer is no."

With all Republican states reporting, Trump lost only the two electors in Texas. One voted for Kasich, the Ohio governor; the other voted for former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

Clinton lost four electors in Washington state -- three voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell and one voted for American Indian tribal leader Faith Spotted Eagle. She also lost an elector in Hawaii to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Clinton beat Sanders in the Democratic primaries.

Several Democratic electors in other states tried to vote for protest candidates but they either changed their votes to Clinton or were replaced.

In Albany, N.Y., former President Bill Clinton sat in the state Senate chamber as an elector and cast one of the Empire State's 29 electoral votes for his wife.

"I've never cast a vote I was prouder of," he told reporters after the meeting.

In a statement, Trump called the vote "a historic electoral landslide," though his percentage of the Electoral College would rank the victory only 46th out of the 58 U.S. presidential elections.

The Electoral College has 538 members, with the number allocated to each state based on how many representatives it has in the House plus one for each senator. The District of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.

Republican electors were deluged with emails, phone calls and letters urging them not to support Trump. Many of the emails were part of coordinated campaigns.

In Baton Rouge, elector Charlie Buckels reached out to Trump's opponents after the New York businessman got all of the state's eight votes.

"For those of you who wished it had gone another way, I thank you for being here," said Buckels, the state GOP finance chairman. "I thank you for your passion for our country."

There is no constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote for the candidate who won their state -- though some states require their electors to vote for the winning candidate.

Those laws, however, are rarely tested. More than 99 percent of electors through U.S. history have voted for the candidate who won their state. Of those who refused, none has ever been prosecuted, according to the National Archives.

Some people have argued that the Electoral College is undemocratic because it gives more weight to less populated states. That is how Clinton, who got more than 2.8 million more votes nationwide, lost the election to Trump.

"It just seems so undemocratic to me that people other than the voters get to choose who leads the country," said Shawn Terris, a Democratic elector from Ventura, Calif.

Some have also tried to dissuade Trump voters by arguing that he is unsuited to the job. Others cite the CIA's assessment that Russia engaged in computer hacking to sway the election in favor of the Republican.

A joint session of Congress is scheduled Jan. 6 to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, with Vice President Joe Biden presiding as president of the Senate. Once the result is certified, the winner -- almost certainly Trump -- will be sworn in Jan. 20.

Information for this article was contributed by Stephen Ohlemacher, Paul Weber, Julie Carr Smyth, Marc Levy, Scott Bauer, Erik Schelzig, Jonathan Mattise, Kathleen Floody, Alex Sanz, Melinda Deslatte, Marina Villeneuve and Juliet A. Williams of The Associated Press; by John McCormick of Bloomberg News; and by Ed O'Keefe of The Washington Post.
Amidst a concerted effort to persuade electors to choose another candidate, Donald Trump earns the required Electoral College votes to be selected as the next President of the United States.