Here's what the Trump protesters are hoping will happen
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."
Marches in some cities Friday were met by police armed with pepper spray and flashbang grenades. In Portland, Oregon, an unknown attacker shot a protester, leaving the injured person with life-threatening wounds.
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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.
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