If you were still holding out some kind of hope that the United States would avoid a Donald Trump presidency at the last moment, this news should signal it's time to move past that: Donald Trump has surpassed 270 electoral votes to officially secure the presidency, theAssociated Press confirmed.
Members of the Electoral College from states around the nation formally cast their votes today. It was Texas, which voted at around 5:28 p.m., that pushed Trump past the needed amount of votes to cement his place as the president-elect. Barring anything absolutely crazy happening, he will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on Jan. 20, almost exactly one month from now.
Trump took to Twitter to celebrate the last step in formally winning the presidency.
There were people, lots of them, holding out a slim hope that the electors would go against the vote of people in their state and refuse to cast their votes for Trump. A recent petition asking electors to do just that was the most popular ever in the history of change.org, and dozens of members of the electoral college were asking for more info on the Russia hack and its influence before they'd cast their vote. A couple of Democratic electors even said at one point they planned to change their votes and were trying to influence their Republican colleagues to do the same.
The debate over the Electoral College system, which allowed to Trump to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million votes, will go on, probably forever (as evidenced by the following tweet, which includes the official statement from the Trump administration).
