Donald Trump officially crossed the line to 270 electoral votes with electors in Texas casting a ballot for the Republican shortly before 5:30 p.m. EST, UK Daily Mail has reported.
Calls for Trump to be voted down by members of the Electoral College were roundly ignored on Monday – with only two ‘faithless’ Republican electors rejecting him and four deserting Democrat Hillary Clinton.
David Bright of Maine was supposed to back the Democratic loser but announced he would defy the wishes of the state’s voters and back Bernie Sanders, her primary opponent.
He was later told he’d be replaced by another elector if he made that move, so decided to vote Clinton instead.
In Minnesota an elector who was supposed to choose Clinton refused to vote and got replaced.
Another ‘faithless’ elector, this time in Colorado, got replaced when he cast a vote for John Kasich instead of Hillary Clinton.
The elector, Micheal Baca, was a prominent Democratic ‘Hamilton elector,’ who was encouraging his GOP peers to unbind themselves from their state’s popular vote winner and choose a more conventional Republican than Trump.
Because Colorado makes its delegates pledge to support the popular vote winner – Clinton in this case – Baca was forced out of the Electoral College and replaced by someone who cast one of the nine pro-Clinton votes for the state.
In Washington state, four electors broke away from Clinton, with some of the votes going to former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Washington was where other Democratic ‘Hamilton electors’ said they would vote across the aisle in hopes that Republicans would follow suit.
Another vote that was supposed to go to Clinton reportedly went to Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American environmentalist protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
In contrast, as the votes were cast in a series of states in the east, the mid-west and the south, just two Texas electors deserted Trump.
