Electoral College vote underway across USA 

The Electoral College vote has started on Monday morning (USA time) in the United States, to formally cast their votes for president.

Today's voting will officially designate Joe Biden as the president-elect and pass a crucial milestone that President Trump has sought to upend with legal challenges and political pressure to overturn the results of a popular election.

Some 538 electors from every state and Washington, DC, are partaking in a critical part of the US electoral process, during which they will vote to affirm the votes cast during the 2020 election.

As of filing of this report, Donald Trump was leading with 56 votes, while Biden got 36. 

Though the meeting of the Electoral College is an important moment in American democracy, it is rarely one that becomes a major political event. But as the president has continued his quixotic campaign to subvert the election, the vote on Monday has loomed as an important deadline, made all the more unusual because there was no state in which the vote was close enough to leave its result in doubt.

Despite the definitive defeat in the Electoral College, Trump has remained defiant, spending his weekend attacking the Supreme Court for rejecting a Texas lawsuit against four battleground states and issuing more baseless accusations about the election from his Twitter account. The president has shown no indication he intends to concede the election.

Today's electoral votes will confirm Joe Biden as the rightful 46th president and California Sen. Kamala Harris as vice president.