for a way to avoid a Trump Presidency.

One Change.org petition suggests convincing the Electoral College to cast their votes

for Clinton, rather than Trump.

The petition has over three million signatures as of November 11th.

But...didn’t Americans already vote?

How could Hillary Clinton still win the Presidency?

Well, in order to understand a Clinton-win scenario, you have to understand the electoral

college.

In a nutshell, the President is not actually elected on election day by the voters.

In fact, the President is elected by an influential group called the “electoral college”.

Each state gets a certain number of electors, indirectly related to the size of their population.

The elector’s only job is to cast their vote based on their state’s popular vote,

thereby acting as an election representative.

For example, California, the most populous state, has 55 electors, which are all expected

to go to Hillary Clinton when they officially vote on December 19th.

If you're wondering why the US uses such an indirect system of voting, it’s because

it was thought of in the late 1700s, when getting the whole country’s votes counted

on the same day was nearly impossible.

Instead, each town or city would select a representative to travel to the nation’s

capital, and let them know how they had voted.

There was also the added benefit, discussed by the Founding Fathers, that it would prevent

anyone without quote “the requisite qualifications” of becoming President.

In short, the Founding Fathers didn’t seem to trust direct democracy, but didn’t want

to make it seem like they were the ones choosing the Presidency alone.

Now this system has worked so far, in fact, so well, that there is NO federal law requiring

electors to vote for their state’s preferred candidate.

21 states have no rules on the issue whatsoever.

An elector can vote for another candidate or refuse to vote altogether.

Moreover, in the other 29 states, plus Washington DC, which do require the elector to vote alongside

the population, they still don’t really have to, because the punishment for doing

so varies from state to state, but is generally a small fine.

Only a few states actually cancel the vote.

Electors who do this are called ‘faithless’, and in the history of the United States, there

have been 157 of them.

In nearly half of those cases, electors didn’t vote for the preferred candidate because the

candidate had died before the vote.

In 3 cases, electors have refused to vote altogether.

The rest of the time, the vote was changed based on political or personal reasons.

To date, faithless electors have not influenced the outcome of an election, but there was

one election where they could have.

In 1836, the election came down to the Democratic Party versus the Whig Party.

Only, instead of having one candidate versus another candidate, the Whigs nominated several

different candidates, hoping to split the vote, thus forcing the House of Representatives

to decide.

But the Democratic candidate, Martin Van Buren ended up winning the popular vote.

On the day of the Electoral College, all 23 electors from Virginia cast their votes against

Van Buren’s Vice President.

Some say this was based on deep political disagreements, others suggest that it was

racially motivated as Van Buren’s VP was in a public relationship with a woman who

was one-eighth African and also his slave.

Either way, the VP candidate fell one electoral vote short of a majority, and wasn’t automatically

elected alongside Van Buren.

It ultimately fell on the US Senate to call the election.

Thankfully, they didn’t appoint anyone else as Van Buren’s VP, and everything went as

planned.

The last faithless elector voted in the 2004 election in Minnesota.

Rather than casting their vote for “John Kerry”, the unknown elector cast their vote

for Kerry’s VP, John Edwards, and also misspelled Edward’s name as “Ewards”.,This year,

the chances of actually overturning Trump’s majority are close to impossible, and would

require 42 faithless electors.

Clinton has already conceded, Trump has begun his transition into the White House, and ignoring

the will of the voters in such a dramatic way would subvert the purpose of a democracy.

By some accounts, it could even lead to a constitutional crisis.

Despite talk of avoiding a Trump Presidency, the reality is that Donald Trump will be the

next president of the United States.

So, how exactly did Trump win the U.S. election?

Find out in this video.

Clinton's inability to garner enough votes from these demographics is part of the reason

Clinton narrowly lost in key states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Since 1992, these sates have been Democratic presidential strongholds, but they have large

populations of rural and working class white voters who make up a majority of Trump's base.

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