Clinton beats Trump by nearly 3M in popular vote

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by just under 3 million votes, final state vote totals aggregated by the Cook Report revealed on Tuesday.

The political news outlet, which has been tracking the votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, found Clinton with 65.8 million votes and 48.2 percent, compared to 62.9 million and 46.6 percent for Republican Donald Trump.

It tweeted out that all of the states plus D.C. had certified their results. 

All 50 states + DC now certified:

Clinton: 65,844,610 (48.2%)
Trump: 62,979,636 (46.1%)
Others: 7,804,213 (5.7%)https://t.co/j58GaxfPmH

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 20, 2016

Other candidates — including Green Party Candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson and write-ins — took 5.7 percent of the popular vote, Cook Report’s data showed.

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The results come a day after the Electoral College voted to secure Trump’s presidency.

On Monday, Trump won 304 Electoral College votes — just two below those he won on election night. Two Republican electors cast their ballots for alternatives.

Clinton got 227 votes after five Democratic electors voted for alternatives.  

Anti-Trump groups had urged Republican electors to defect but those efforts fell flat. Clinton received more defections than Trump in the final tally.

Many Democrats across the country have called for an end to the Electoral College since the election.

On Monday, The New York Times’s editorial board pushed for ending the Electoral College, calling it an “antiquated mechanism” that eliminates “basic fairness” from the presidential race.

Clinton is the second Democrat to lose the presidential election but win the popular vote in the last five races. Republican George W. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 election after Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes — a sizably smaller lead than Clinton.

This story was updated at 3:04 p.m.