Earlier, the group met with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the new president's brother, in his office.
"I'm kind of excited that the election is formally going to be over as of today," Jeb Bush said.
Cynthia Handley was one of many electors who had received calls from Democrats asking them to cast their electoral ballots for failed Democratic nominee Al Gore.
"I felt sorry for the people that felt compelled to call me because you've got to learn to lose and you have to go on with your life and make plans, and they obviously are still hung up on trying to win," Handley said.
Florida law prohibits electors from voting for a candidate from a different party than the one for which they were selected. They must also take an oath promising to vote for their party's candidate when they become electors. If a Florida elector were to vote for another party's candidate, that vote would be invalidated and he would be immediately replaced by an alternate.
Elector Mel Martinez of Orlando, who is Orange County chairman, said, "We are under an Electoral College system, and this is the way the system is supposed to work, and today is just a ceremony to enact what happened on Election Day when most Florida voters elected George W. Bush and he was the certified winner."
Jeb Bush talked about some of the issues that came up after the election, when his brother had won by less than one-half of 1 percent of the Florida vote, triggering an automatic recount under state law.
"How do we go about recounting votes? That's an area that I think needs to be looked at," he said.
"There ought to be some standard that everybody can adhere to, and I think that in the case of technology, or the voting equipment in general, there's probably going to be some recommendations that the Legislature could look at to create some standard there, too." Bush had previously appointed a blue-ribbon panel to study these issues.
After convening the meeting of the electors in the state Senate chambers, Bush told them their meeting was being held at a historic time. "We have been the focal point of this election for the past month.
"I want to once again commend both my brother, the president-elect, and Vice President Al Gore for their speeches of last week to show that this country, in spite of a very hard-fought election, in spite of an incredibly close election, when it gets down to it, we're all Americans.
"We're all focused on the rule of law. We all believe in and love our country and we believe it's the greatest country on the face of this Earth.
"And I want to pay my respects particularly to Vice President Gore for his incredibly gracious concession speech so that we're now here without all sorts of other legal issues to deal with."
He said the election in Florida was one of the most exciting he had ever been involved in. He hoped the significantly higher voter turnout and the "sense of passion in the political process" people demonstrated would not wane.
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