Here's what the Trump protesters are hoping will happen

Trump protesters in NYC
(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Protesters objecting to the election of Donald Trump took to the streets for the third night Friday in cities across America. Chief among their demands is an upset in the Electoral College: In some states, electors can vote for a candidate other than the one selected by a majority of voters in their state without facing legal consequences.

Protesters hope "faithless electors" will support Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote. Though some electors have been faithless in the past, never have enough changed their vote to alter the outcome of a presidential election. As Snopes put it, such a turn of events is "extremely, extremely unlikely" and would be "wholly unprecedented in American history and would require a sudden and drastic change in the United States' political traditions."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.