Some liberals who really, really, really don't want Donald Trump to be president are pinning their hopes on a long-shot effort to prevent him from officially winning the election.
Understanding how their plan would work requires some background on the electoral college, which was established in the Constitution at a time when the founding fathers were wary of direct democracy.
As widely known, presidents are not chosen based on the national popular vote — if they were, Hillary Clinton would be the next commander in chief, given she is ahead by roughly 1.7 million votes.
Each state is assigned a certain number of electoral votes based on population. Those votes are awarded to candidates based on the state's popular vote. Trump won the presidential race with 290 electoral votes. (That total will reach 306 if Michigan is called for him, as expected.)
The process doesn't end on election day. Each electoral vote is represented by an elector, an actual person who has to cast an official ballot for the president on Dec. 19. The electors are chosen through different processes state by state, and usually are selected by state political parties.
With unrest over the result, there are efforts to persuade electors to be "faithless," meaning they wouldn't back Trump even if he won their states. A Change.org petition calling the president-elect a "danger to the Republic" has almost 4.6 million supporters.
What are the chances of this actually happening? Very slim, says George C. Edwards III, a Texas A&M political science professor who has written a book about the electoral college.
"From time to time, there are faithless electors," he said. "They’re few and far between."
There were some electors who refused to vote for winning candidates in the 1800s, such as six who declined to support James Madison, but never enough to sway the outcome of the race. In the last century there have only been a handful of cases.
There were some attempts to persuade electors to back Al Gore over George W. Bush during the disputed 2000 election, but they were unsuccessful.
