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  • With Donald Trump as the new President-elect, supporters of Hillary Clinton have been looking

  • 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 theelectoral 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 quotethe requisite qualificationsof 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 calledfaithless’, 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 forJohn Kerry”, the unknown elector cast their vote

  • for Kerry’s VP, John Edwards, and also misspelled Edward’s name asEwards”.,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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  • every day.

With Donald Trump as the new President-elect, supporters of Hillary Clinton have been looking

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