Hillary Clinton wins 2,864,974 more votes than Donald Trump, final US election count shows
Democrat comes in just 72,000 votes shy of Barack Obama's winning margin in 2012
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Your support makes all the difference.Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote by more than 2.86 million ballots, the final tally in the US presidential election has revealed.
According to the Cook Political Report, the Democrat beat the President-elect by 2,864,974 - more than five times the margin garnered by Al Gore in 2000 when he also lost the Electoral College.
The final count comes after 304 electors voted for Donald Trump on Monday, meaning that although two electors defected, he cleared the 270-vote hurdle and will be sworn in as president next month.
Mr Trump's win ranks 46th out of 58 on the list of Electoral College votes secured by US Presidents since George Washington in 1789. His popular vote tally was more than two percentage points lower than Ms Clinton's, at 46.1 per cent against her 48.2 per cent – or 62.98 million against 65.84 million.
Ms Clinton's tally was just under 72,000 votes shy of Barack Obama's popular vote count in the 2012 election.
Mr Trump won 30 states in the 8 November election, securing 306 of the 538 Electoral College votes – 56.9 per cent of the total.
Only 12 other elections have seen a president receive a lower proportion of Electoral College votes, including George W Bush in 2000 and 2004, and John F Kennedy in 1960.
Confirmation of Mr Trump's victory ended an acrimonious final chapter in an election cycle that saw former president Bill Clinton accuse the director of the FBI, James Comey, of costing his wife the White House, and activists flood the letterboxes of Electoral College members with pleas to abandon the Republican candidate.
Despite the pressure on electors, experts had said a Trump defeat in the Electoral College was extremely unlikely.
Dr Jacob Parakilas, assistant head of the US and Americas Programme at Chatham House, told The Independent: "A lot of this is just a reaction to how outlandish the whole election season has been.
"I think there's also a sense that because Trump won with a significant gap between the Electoral College and the popular vote, that underscores calls for the Electoral College to do something different than it normally does.
"By and large, those calls are going to fall on deaf ears."
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