Long-shot bid to block Donald Trump arrives at Electoral College on Monday

CHICAGO — The Electoral College’s 538 members gather Monday at 50 state capitols to cast the ballots that matter the most when it comes to electing a U.S. president.

Normally sedate affairs that pass with little notice, this year’s proceedings have been injected with a bit of drama and a dash of uncertainty with an unprecedented campaign by a small group of electors to overturn the results of Election Day.

The attempt to deny Donald Trump the presidency by trying to convince Democratic and Republican peers to back someone else is almost sure to fail. But it injects still more rancor in what already has been a divisive political season and serves as a capstone for a 2016 presidential election that will go down as one of the oddest in U.S. history.

Behind the drive is a group calling itself Hamilton Electors, led by two Democratic electors from western states. The name is a nod to Alexander Hamilton and his explanation of the need for the Electoral College, an entity the first U.S. Treasury secretary said existed to make sure that “the office of the president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Bret Chiafalo, an Electoral College member from Washington state who is a Hamilton Electors organizer, calls the institution the nation’s “emergency brake” in a video that outlines the group’s goals. “If only 37 Republican electors change their vote, Donald Trump will not have the 270 electoral votes he needs to be president,” he says. “Thirty-seven patriots can save this country.”

Chiafalo and others who have joined the effort want the Electoral College returned to what they say is its original concept: a deliberative body that uses the popular vote as a guide.

The turmoil among electors was stirred last week after President Barack Obama directed U.S. intelligence agencies to deliver a report on Russian hacking of Democratic Party emails, and the Washington Post reported that the CIA concluded the meddling was intended to benefit Trump.

Those developments have prompted 56 electors — all but one of them Democrats in states Democrat Hillary Clinton won — to sign onto a letter requesting a briefing about the hacking. Some Democrats have also called for the Electoral College voting to be pushed back until more is known, something that would take an act of Congress.

None of the 56 — almost a quarter of the Democrats forming this year’s Electoral College — have necessarily joined in the call for Republican electors to back a consensus candidate that Republican and Democratic electors might support.

That doesn’t have to be Clinton. Members of the Hamilton Electors have mentioned former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and Ohio Gov. John Kasich as potential alternatives.

Yet another effort to persuade electors is playing out in full-page newspaper ads this week in states that voted for Trump. Paid for by an online fundraising drive started by a California man opposed to Trump, the ads call for electors to reject Trump because he would “present a grave and continual threat to the Constitution, to the domestic tranquility, and to international stability.”