President-elect Donald Trump has received adequate electoral votes to officially become the 47th president of the United States.
Mr Trump reached a major milestone after Texas’ electors awarded him the state’s 40 electoral votes at their meeting in Austin on Tuesday.
The electors’ decisions in Austin formalised Mr Trump’s victory in the November 5 presidential election which saw him crush her rival Vice-President Kamala Harris.
It takes 270 of the 538 electoral votes to be elected a U.S. president.
Mr Trump won 312 in November’s election. Ms Harris got 226 votes.
So far, every elector has voted for the candidate they were elected to represent.
It is now expected that each state’s votes be sent to Congress on January 6 for a joint session of lawmakers to officially tally the electoral votes and declare Mr Trump the next U.S. president.
Mr Trump will be inaugurated on January 20, 2025.
The electoral college was established in the U.S. Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the president by a vote in Congress and the election of the president by a popular vote of qualified citizens.
This year’s electoral college meeting in Austin was less dramatic than it was in 2020 because Mr Trump won the election. Mr Trump was cantankerous when he lost his previous bid for reelection.
Ms Harris said she had accepted the results in good faith.
The process was also seamless as a result of the Electoral Count Reform Act, a bipartisan law passed in 2022, clarifying how exactly the process should work and making it harder to dispute the results.
