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The Electoral College meets today. The Constitution specifies that presidential electors assemble in their own states, so it is really 51 different meetings, one in each state capital and one in the District of Columbia. Everyone knows Donald Trump and J.D. Vance will win. The real question is whether Democrat electors will vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

“Faithless electors” is the term for presidential electors who vote for someone other than their party’s nominee. The possibility that electors won’t vote as expected allows for bizarre machinations and hyperventilating hypotheses, but all that misses the point. Electors are nominated by their own party. They are partisans with overwhelming incentives to support their party’s candidates when it matters. This is why faithless electors have never changed—or come close to changing—an election result.

Actual faithless electors are typically on the losing side and trying to send a message. This was true of Mike Padden. I met him while he was serving in the Washington State Senate, but in 1976 he was a Republican activist and attorney. That year he was nominated by the Washington State Republican Party to be a presidential elector. When the Republican ticket—Gerald Ford and Bob Dole—won the state, Padden became one of Washington’s nine electors.

While Ford swept the West, the Democrats—Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale—won nearly all of the South plus much of the Midwest and Rustbelt. This gave the Democrats an edge in the Electoral College, which they won with 297 votes.

Padden was a presidential elector, but on the losing side. He also believed his party had nominated the wrong man. Padden preferred Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, who was already identified as the more pro-life candidate as opposed to Ford. And so Padden expressed his view in the most visible way he could, by casting an electoral vote for Reagan (he still voted for Dole for vice president).

In the modern era, this has been the pattern. There was one faithless elector each in 1988 and 2000, but both were on the losing side. In 2016, there were thirteen electors who attempted to cast “faithless” votes; all but two were on the losing side (three had their votes invalidated based on state laws). The only other election since 1976 with a faithless elector was 2004, when a Minnesota Democrat apparently just made a mistake.

The question looming over this meeting of the Electoral College is whether Democrats chosen as presidential electors will use the opportunity for something other than a final endorsement of Harris and Walz.

In 2020, the Supreme Court upheld laws that punish and replace faithless electors. Most states today have such a law. Yet some Democrat electors still have the power to vote their conscience. New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island have no state laws binding presidential electors. Several other blue states have laws that try to bind electors but do not actually cancel out faithless electors’ votes. Altogether more than 50 Democrat electors could reject Harris.

These Democrats could use their power to make a statement about the nominating process, or that they believe Biden was still a stronger candidate. Or, looking forward, electors might take the opportunity, as Mike Padden did in 1976, to highlight a candidate they want to see on the next presidential ticket.

Faithless electors have never come close to changing an election outcome. Instead, they have lodged protest votes and made other kinds of political statements. After a bruising year for Democrats, it would be unsurprising to see some of their presidential electors take the opportunity to make their own voices heard.