America’s electoral college, the body that votes state by state to decide the outcome of US elections, has officially confirmed Donald Trump as the next president, erasing his opponents’ hopes of overturning last month’s result.
Texas was the state to send Mr Trump over the threshold of 270 electoral college votes needed to win the office last night. Six electors defied the result of their state’s popular vote and cast a ballot for a candidate other than those who won.
With voting completed in 43 states, two electors in Texas had rejected Mr Trump. Four electors in Washington State turned against Hillary Clinton.
Three wrote in Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, and another voted for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Sioux Indian chairwoman, instead of the Democratic winner. An elector in Maine suggested that he would vote for Bernie Sanders, who lost to Mrs Clinton in the Democratic race.
The high number of defectors is unusual: only nine electors have been faithless in presidential elections in the past 70 years.
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The 538 ballots will be formally counted in Washington on January 6 at a special session of Congress, but the results tabulated by each of the states confirmed that the electors had ignored threats, pleas and sometimes their own doubts about Mr Trump.
Mr Trump’s 304 votes would rank him 46th out of 58 in the size of electoral college victories. He lost the popular vote by 2.8 million ballots. He said: “Today marks a historic electoral landslide victory in our nation’s democracy. I thank the American people for their overwhelming vote to elect me as their next president of the United States.”
An intense campaign was waged to sway electors, who are chosen for the job at their state party conventions.
Ash Khare, an Indian immigrant who had chosen to be an elector there, said that he was proud to cast his vote for Mr Trump. The Republican candidate “won Pennsylvania fair and square”, he said, adding: “I have not seen anything from the election to today or anything he has done to change my mind.”
Michael Moore, the outspoken documentary film-maker from Michigan, offered to pay the fine issued to any so-called faithless elector in that state. Some were threatened with violence if they stuck with Mr Trump, but none of them defected.
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Norman Eisen, an ethics lawyer in the Obama administration, said that he had been in touch with some electors who had concerns about Mr Trump’s alleged ties to Russia and other conflicts of interest that could make him unqualified for office.
Jeff Cardwell, an elector in Indiana, said that he had received more than 80,000 emails from people across the country begging him not to vote for Mr Trump and Mike Pence, the future vice-president. None of Indiana’s 11 electors was expected to defect.
The president-elect received an influential endorsement of a different kind, with Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state under Nixon and Ford, saying that he could create an “extraordinary opportunity” for the United States.
“Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen,” Mr Kissinger, 93, told the news programme Face the Nation. “I think he operates by a kind of instinct that is a different form of analysis as my more academic one.”
Mr Kissinger said that other countries would be forced to rethink the perception that America had withdrawn from international engagement, which had been created by President Obama’s administration.
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“Here is a new president who’s asking a lot of unfamiliar questions,” Mr Kissinger said. “One could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it.”