Despite an unusual amount of grassroots pressure, the vast majority of the members of the electoral college voted Monday to represent how their state voted — not "their conscience" as some Hillary Clinton supporters had urged them to do. By Monday afternoon, the majority of the electoral college (270) voted for Donald J. Trump to be our 45th president. (Updates here.) But Monday put the most strain put on the electoral college system in modern history. Shell-shocked Clinton supporters across the country seized on this usually arcane part of the U.S. presidential election process as a last-ditch hope Clinton would become president — or at least Trump wouldn't. Their efforts were buoyed by two things: 1) Russia, and the assessment of the CIA and FBI it interfered with the U.S. elections by hacking and leaking embarrassing Democratic emails, which risked calling into question Trump's thin victory (his ranked 46th out of 58 electoral college results). 2) The rules of the electoral college, which is that really there are no rules. In the end, neither was enough to change the election, nor thwart the way we've elected our presidents for hundreds of years. Still, there's a lasting echo in all of this drama: Can electoral college votes be changed via lobbying? To understand more, we have to better understand the electoral college. How does the electoral college work again? A protester in Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela/Getty Images) Think of it kind of like a video game: Each state's popular vote is worth a different amount of points, based on population. So even though Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, under a point-based system, Trump won the majority of points (270) to become president. These "points" are actually electors — 538 people in total. (538/2 = 269.). But other than the fact electors exist in each state, how the process works is not uniform. In fact, the Constitution doesn't actually tell us how electors are supposed to vote. Electors are chosen a variety of ways. Some are chosen by their state's parties; California's are chosen by their congressional delegation. (Go figure: House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi's daughter is an elector. In New York, Bill Clinton is an an elector.) About a month after the election, the electors of each state get together and vote. Some vote by secret ballot, others out in the open. Some have to pay a fine if they don't vote the way their state voted, others don't. Our founders had plenty of debate about how much freedom electors should have to use their discretion. Alexander Hamilton wanted these electors to make their own decisions about who to vote for. In the end, the winning argument was that these electors should vote the will of the people in their state, because any other outcome would be overturning the will of the voters. The vast majority of electors have done so ever since. That longstanding tradition held in 2016, too, suggesting that for now, lobbying can't trump tradition. | 