In the weeks since the 2016 election, one thing has become painfully clear.

The involvement of a foreign government in the tampering of the election results has made the desire to block the ascension of the Republican candidate a bipartisan issue.

We are not a sovereign, free nation, if either Russia or a fascist faction gets to choose our president instead of clear, informed majority of the people.

Some of us are hoping for this issue to be resolved by the flipping of enough Electoral College votes to the Democratic candidate.

However, many of us who have been hoping for this outcome since November 8 realize this is a long shot.

A lot of unlikely, unprecedented things must occur for the Electoral College to invalidate current the President-elect.

Of course, one could argue that a lot of unlikely, unprecedented things happened to get us to where we are now.

Let’s look at what has to happen for the electors to save us.

Could the Electoral College save us?

First at least 37 votes have to be cast for a person other than that state’s winner, causing a mutual loss, or 38 must go to the Democratic ticket, or to another Republican candidate of the electors choosing.

In the case of a mutual loss, the House of Representatives chooses the president from among the top three candidates. A similar situation occurs if the electoral college results in a tie, but the House would be free

Since the vote for the presidential candidate and the vice presidential candidate are separate, we could end up with a Democratic candidate and a Republican vice president.

In most of the possible scenarios, if the vote goes to the House, since it is Republican controlled, it’s most likely that we would end up back in our current situation.

The Associated Press reached about 330 of the 538 electors, and only one of those polled asserted that they were going to vote against the currently recognized President-elect.

Of course, less than 40 of the ones they did not interview would need to flip their votes for us to have a different outcome.

Several “faithless electors” as they are called, have publicly stated that they believe it is their civic duty to uphold the intentions of the founding fathers, in particular Alexander Hamilton.

Now that slavery is illegal (outside of prison) in the United States, this is actually the only remaining function of the Electoral College. Technology has eliminated all other reasons for “one person, one vote” not to be the law of the land.

Of course technology is also the reason we don’t go with the popular vote.

The founding fathers had faith in democracy or of course they would not have mandated it. Yet they were afraid that a faction could dupe more than half of the nation, and this “misinformed populace” could then elect a demagogue.

Which is exactly what happened.

Again, this is the Electoral College’s remaining actual job, to reject the President-elect, whose conduct meets the literal definition of a demagogue. Whether or not they will cave to the pressure to ignore their duty is another matter.

The good news is, there is hope.

At most only a few states or 38 individual electors give this plan a chance.

And if it fails?

This option is just one of several plans that are in motion to restore our democracy, or prevent what’s left of it from being dismantled.

Given how remote the possibility of success is, you might wonder what the point is of asserting our rights as American citizens to demand a more just situation?

And in the likely event that the current plan fails, what’s next?

We’ll talk about that next.