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Electors officially cast their votes

Posted by Foon Rhee, deputy national political editor December 15, 2008 06:05 PM

Today marks another milestone on the path for the nation's first black president.

Electors met in each state to cast their votes, which are to be counted by Congress on Jan. 6, and formally elected Barack Obama as president, according to a tally by The Associated Press.

Though electors are not obligated to follow the popular vote, they almost always do. Obama won states totaling 365 electoral votes on Nov. 4 -- well above the 270 needed in the Electoral College.

In New Hampshire, the Associated Press reports, the state's four electoral votes were cast by the two co-chairmen of Obama's primary campaign in the Granite State -- Senator Martha Fuller Clark and Ned Helms -- and two prominent backers of Hillary Clinton -- former state party director Kathy Sullivan and former Democratic National Committee member Gaetan DiGangi.

Obama lost the state's first-in-the-nation primary to Clinton in January, but the two united forces, and he nominated Clinton to be secretary of state.

"I'd like to congratulate all the voters of New Hampshire for making both the primary and the general election so successful. We were able to come together as a unified whole to support the first African-American president of the United States, which is truly an extraordinary moment for all of us," Fuller Clark said, according to the AP.

There will also be another kind of history today -- for the first time since 1892, a state will divide its electoral votes. Obama won one of the votes in Nebraska, which joins Maine as the only states that divide theirs by congressional district. Republican John McCain won the other four in Nebraska.

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