Last Hope For Anti-Trump Camp Is The Electoral College

WASHINGTON, , (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 13th Dec, 2016 ) - Americans aghast over the idea of Donald Trump as president are turning to the Electoral College -- the somewhat puzzling, much criticized institution that will make it official -- as a last-ditch recourse to halt the inevitable.

Its 538 members -- the government says it is not even a body, really, but rather a process -- will vote December 19 to formally confirm Trump's stunning win over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November 8 election.

Clinton won the popular vote by two percentage points, but Trump took the only thing that mattered: a majority of the electoral college, and a healthy one at that: 306 to 232. There are Americans out there who want the college to declare Clinton the winner, anyway, because she triumphed in the popular vote.

In 21 states, electors can vote their conscience, regardless of who won the popular vote in their state and -- thus in theory at least -- all that state's electoral votes. But it is extremely rare for an elector to go rogue.

It has happened just nine times since World War II, says FairVote, a non-partisan group working for electoral reform. For people opposed to Trump -- the shoot-from-the-hip property tycoon with no experience in government, the man who insulted women, minorities and Muslims during the campaign and has the world watching closely as he hints at upending decades of US foreign policy with blasts of pre-dawn tweets -- the nuclear electoral college option is a godsend.