The results are in: Donald Trump has officially been elected as the 45th President of the United States.
On Election Day, according to state laws
governing the awarding of electoral votes based on the results of the popular
vote, Trump won 306 votes, and Hillary Clinton won 232. The margin was
virtually unchanged yesterday; Trump took 304, and Clinton, 227. Two pledged
Trump electors from Texas went rogue, one voting for John Kasich and the other
for Ron Paul. (So the Libertarian Party will still end up with an electoral vote, despite Gary Johnson's failure to make a splash.) Meanwhile, five Clinton electors across the country voted for
several other people, including Bernie Sanders, Colin Powell, and Faith Spotted
Eagle (an American Indian activist involved in the Dakota Access pipeline
fight).
Amusingly, for all the talk of
Republican electors voting for someone other than Trump, Clinton actually lost
more votes to faithless electors. And it could have been even worse for her—another
three pledged Clinton electors in Minnesota, Maine, and Colorado attempted to
vote for someone else (Sanders in Maine and Minnesota, and Kasich in Colorado)
but had their votes invalidated due to state laws binding electors to the
results of the statewide popular vote.
Some unexpected names also received
electoral votes for Vice President: Carly Fiorina, Susan Collins, Maria
Cantwell, and Winona LaDuke (the Green Party’s 2000 VP nominee).
Seven rogue electors may be well short
of the thirty-seven that would have been needed to actually change the results
of the election, but it’s still hard to count the ways in which this was
historic:
·
Most number of
faithless electors in a single election, beating the previous record of six,
set in 1808.
·
Most people to
receive at least one electoral vote for president in a single election.
·
First time the
Green Party has received an electoral vote for President or Vice President
(Winona LaDuke).
·
First time
faithless electors voted for a candidate from the other major party (the three
Democrats in Washington State who voted for Colin Powell).
·
And Faith Spotted
Eagle now has a place in history, going from completely unknown activist to one
of only two women (along with Hillary Clinton) to have won Electoral College
votes for President.
Odd footnotes to a crazy year.
And presumably, now that Trump has
officially been elected President, liberals will forget their brief infatuation
with the power of the Electoral College and “Hamilton electors” and go back to
decrying it as a relic of slavery.
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