With all ballots counted, Hillary Clinton leads Trump by nearly 3 million votes

Counting has finally finished in all 50 states following last month’s Presidential election – and Hillary Clinton got just shy of three million votes more than Donald Trump.

Despite a crushing loss in the popular vote of several percentage points, Republican billionaire Donald Trump was the surprise victor last month thanks to the Electoral College system.

Trump pulled off a series of narrow wins in a number of battleground states despite losing heavily elsewhere, handing him enough electoral votes to be President despite his smaller vote share.

Ballot counting has now concluded in all 50 states, and the official total show the shocking scale of the disparity.

President-elect Trump took 46.1% of the popular vote, with 62,979,636 votes.

Defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton meanwhile took 65,844,610 votes – more than two whole percentage points ahead of Trump, with 48.2% of the vote.

In total, Clinton took 2,864,974 votes more than President-elect Trump.

The gap is more than five times bigger than the previous popular vote disparity, in the 2000 election, when Vice President Al Gore won 543,895 more votes than George W Bush but narrowly lost the Electoral College due to a controversial loss in Florida.

Clinton’s total vote count, 65,844,610, comes close to equalling President Obama’s winning vote count from 2012, when he picked up 65,915,795 votes.

The final result comes as Trump’s election was officially cemented, as members of the Electoral College cemented his win.

Trump received 304 votes, with Clinton taking just 227.

Trump has pledged to sign the Republican-backed First Amendment Defence Act, a law that would permit forms of anti-LGBT discrimination on the grounds of religion.

VP-elect Mike Pence has confirmed a plan to dismantle Barack Obama’s anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people, while Trump’s public shortlist for Supreme Court vacancies are expected to tip the majority against LGBT equality.