Donald Trump off to a strong start in Electoral College

Donald Trump started racking up electoral votes today even as anti-Trump protesters across the country tried to persuade the Electoral College to prevent him from winning the White House.

Trump didn't lose any electors with votes counted in a half dozen states he won November 8: Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Initial results gave Trump 44 votes and Democrat Hillary Clinton, 10. It takes 270 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency.

Electors were voting throughout the day and there was scant evidence many GOP electors would peel away from their Election Day winner. More than three dozen would have to abandon him to complicate his path to the presidency.

More than 200 demonstrators braved freezing temperatures at Pennsylvania's capitol, chanting, "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!" and "No treason, no Trump!"

Protesters also gathered in Colorado, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Nebraska and other states.

The protesters, however, were unlikely to persuade the Electoral College to dump Trump. An Associated Press survey of electors found very little appetite to vote for alternative candidates. Only one Republican said he would vote for someone else.

Republican electors have been deluged with emails, phone calls and letters urging them not to support Trump. Many of the emails are part of coordinated campaigns.

"The letters are actually quite sad," said Lee Green, a Republican elector from North Carolina. "They are generally freaked out. They honestly believe the propaganda. They believe our nation is being taken over by a dark and malevolent force."

Wirt A Yerger Jr, a Republican elector in Mississippi, said, "I have gotten several thousand emails asking me not to vote for Trump. I threw them all away."

A joint session of Congress is scheduled for January 6 to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, with Vice President Joe Biden presiding as president of the Senate. Once the result is certified, the winner -- almost certainly Trump -- will be sworn in on January 20.

The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was a compromise between those who wanted popular elections for president and those who wanted no public input.

The Electoral College has 538 members, with the number allocated to each state based on how many representatives it has in the House plus one for each senator. The District of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.