THE last-ditch effort by some Democrats to thwart a Donald Trump presidency ended in a fizzle on December 19th. The 538 members of the electoral college—the body that officially elects America’s chief executive, as ordained by Article II of the constitution—handed the real-estate magnate 304 votes, two shy of the total he was projected to win after the people voted on November 8th but a comfortable 34 votes more than the 270 he needed to win a majority. Mr Trump is set to be inaugurated as America’s 45th president on January 20th.

The ill-fated Hail Mary was lobbed by a number of liberal intellectuals, including Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and short-lived 2016 presidential candidate. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post last month, Mr Lessig observed that Hillary Clinton handily won the national popular vote. Since electoral-college electors are “citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel”, they should feel free to ignore the popular vote totals in their home states. Electors should then stand up for the principle of “one person, one vote”, Mr Lessig suggested, and switch their allegiance to Hillary Clinton. Other advocates called on Trump electors to use their independent judgment to vote for another, more savoury Republican. If 38 electors would opt for the likes of John Kasich or Mitt Romney, Mr Trump would fall short of 270 and the House of Representatives would get to pick the president from among the top-three vote getters. The House would then be free to send a Republican other than Mr Trump to the White House.

The pitch was always a long-shot, but Mr Lessig claimed days before the vote that there were as many as 30 and “at least 20” electors who were willing to abandon Mr Trump and vote for somebody else (though he added that, if it looked as if the total would fall short of 37, only a few would actually vote that way). Sure enough, in the end only two Republican electors turned coat, one toward Mr Kasich and one for Ron Paul. As it happens, four times as many Democrats moved to cast a vote against Hillary Clinton, but three of the eight were replaced before they could violate their pledges. Of the five successfully disloyal Democrats, three voted for Colin Powell, George W. Bush’s Republican secretary of state, one picked Bernie Sanders and one opted for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American who has taken a leading role in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The vote seemed to throw cold water on a strategy that had drawn public attention to hitherto obscure passages in America’s founding documents. The staple excerpts trumpted by the Hamilton Electors, as they called themselves, came from Federalist 68, an essay in which Alexander Hamilton pitches the electoral college as an institution promising “a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”. If the electors refused to exercise independent judgment to keep a fact-averse political novice with intractable conflicts of interests and fascistic tendencies out of the White House, when would they?

No realistic observer expected 37 Republican loyalists—more than 10% of the total—to send Mr Trump packing (in many cases violating state laws and exposing themselves to financial penalties). But it is remarkable that 7 of the 538 electors felt free to switch their votes, by far the most in recent memory. This election was the first since 1872 with more than one faithless elector. (In that election, Horace Greeley, a Democrat, died after losing to Ulysses S. Grant; all but three of his 66 electors parcelled their votes out to other candidates.)

The failure of the rebellion will not be more than a footnote to the 2016 presidential election. Yet it may leave an enduring legacy. The campaign waged by Mr Lessig and others encouraged electors to think for themselves rather than feel bound to represent the winning candidate in their states. Thousands of e-mails and hundreds of letters to electors urged them to pick someone—anyone—other than Mr Trump. “You are not cogs”, Mr Lessig beseeched electors. The duty to uphold the elector pledge, he said, is “not your only moral obligation. You also have an obligation to the Constitution. And to your fellow citizens. And to your God. And to yourself.” It is fine to be a rubber stamp in typical election years, Mr Lessig wrote. In 56 presidential elections, “we haven’t needed” electors to exercise “judgment”. But, he implored, “we do now”.

Here we find a mantra among instigators of the failed electoral coup: this election is different. Mr Trump represents a unique threat to the American republic. The electoral college should thumb its nose at democratic laws and norms as an emergency measure to save the union. This time only. When a Trumpian figure is not on the ballot, there will be no need for the electors to take such radical measures to prevent America from sliding into the abyss.

This point contains a deep fallacy. Once the electoral college is untethered from its traditional role as rubber stamp of the state results, there is no way to pin back its power. Mr Lessig and his political allies may not view elections to come as appropriate times for electors to rebel, and they may have excellent reasons for electors to stay even-tempered and dutiful in those contests. But other voices may drown out the law professors’ carefully reasoned appeals. And once the principle is established that electors are self-justifying sources of their own political scruples, the question of when to revolt no longer lies in commentators’ hands. Whether to ratify or to rebel becomes the province of the individual elector. And while it will remain highly unlikely, for various reasons, that dozens of electors will flip their votes in any particular election, the 2016 experience shows that a half-dozen or so is a live possibility, and a concerted effort could easily attract more.

That tantalising fact makes it much more likely that future close elections will be an exercise in elector-courting. With a budding electoral vote split of 273-265, for example, just four electors would need to be persuaded to abandon the winning candidate to throw the election to the loser, or, at least, to the whims of the House of Representatives. Imagine a scenario in which Donald Trump is about to lose to, say, Elizabeth Warren by such a gap in 2020. Would he quietly back down, accepting his fate as a one-term president? Or would he send his negotiators on a tour of America, focusing on states that do not punish electors for straying, and find three malleable souls willing to reconsider and give him another chance?

The corruption of the electoral college need not be that tawdry or thorough to inspire worries about the future legitimacy of America’s presidential contests. If electors feel empowered to indulge their own political preferences, and enabled to make a personal mark on history, the result may be a handful of unelected people overturning a verdict delivered by 135m or more voters. That is precisely the precedent that the failed 2016 electoral coup has unwittingly set.

This post has been changed to take account of the context in which Lawrence Lessig identified the total of 20-30 electors willing to vote for Donald Trump.