Long read: Trump’s ‘Hail Mary’ pass and the questions it raises about how presidents are elected

Despite media projections that Joe Biden is the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump continues to make claims to the contrary. Jeffrey K. Tulis writes that Trump’s legal challenges to vote counts and pressure on state officials to change their Electoral College votes in closely contested states are a “Hail Mary” tactic to keep the presidency. Contrasting Trump’s current efforts to influence the Electoral College with 2016 calls for electors to be “faithless” and to not vote for Trump, he writes that the Electoral College has lost one of its original functions: to prevent demagogues from entering the White House.