It's people like Margaret Leach and Mike Padden who give political managers sleepless nights. In 1988, in defiance of her state's mandate, Ms Leach, an electoral college member for West Virginia, decided to switch her vote from the Democratic Party's candidate, Mr Michael Dukakis.
In 1976, Mr Padden from Washington State did likewise on the Republican side, depriving Ronald Reagan of a vote in favour of the incumbent, president Gerald Ford.
In 1972 a Virginia elector, Mr Roger MacBridge, also a Republican, voted for a little-known Libertarian candidate, Mr John Hospers, even though he was pledged to support Richard Nixon.
Such cases of defections in the all-important electoral college - none of them with any effect on the final result - are rare enough that their names are remembered by election junkies. Rare enough, but even the possibility that the party loyalists nominated to the college would do so in this election's knife-edge contest must be scaring the hell out of campaign managers.
For US voters do not elect a president. Under a system first proposed by an Irish-American, Pierce Butler, of whom more anon, voters elect 538 electors from the states to a "college" which in turn will cast the votes for them when the electors assemble in their state capitals on December 18th. The tallies are then sent to Congress which will formally count them on January 6th.
In theory, under an unused and unclear federal statute of 1876, members of Congress then have the right to object to any electoral vote not "regularly given". Could Florida's votes be challenged successfully there? No one knows, for this is uncharted territory.
And there are other possibilities. The magic majority number is 270, with the votes for Mr Gore and Mr Bush now poised at 260-246. Florida's 25 votes, as everyone by now knows, are crucial but would only push Mr Bush narrowly over the required majority to 271 (if Oregon's seven, still counting, go to Mr Gore).
Three defectors could then tip it.
Margaret Leach is recorded as saying she did it in protest at the electoral college system itself. "It was nice to make a mark on history," she said. A footnote then would be a chapter now.
But this time there might be all the more reason for an idealistic Republican to do so to prevent his or her candidate taking the Presidency against the popular vote.
Or, God forbid, there's even the possibility of corruption, as Senator Bob Dole warned a congressional hearing in 1977. "It just seems to me," he said, "that the temptation is there for the elector in a very tight race to really negotiate quite a bunch."
Despite the reality that the system last produced a crisis in 1888, Dr Laurence Tribe, an expert on electoral law at Harvard Law School, describes the electoral college as "a train wreck waiting to happen".
Even two defections in the college in the above scenario would result in a 269-269 tie where the new House of Representatives would be asked to break the deadlock. But the House does not vote by member. It votes by state, each state getting one vote, and whoever gets 26 votes is declared president. That would tend to favour the Republicans, who have a majority in 25 state delegations.
Electoral college members are almost invariably unknowns and normally nominated by the parties from the ranks of their most loyal supporters, usually backroom activists or local state officials. In Florida's case the law provides that the nominations shall be made by the local parties' state executive committees.
In 26 states there is no legal prohibition on electors, "faithless electors", switching their allegiance, and where there is it is usually not even subject to more than a small fine. There really is no need, as Mr Reynolds Hold, a Democrat elector from Wisconsin, said when asked if he could even think of jumping ship: "Not in my lifetime. I wouldn't get out of the capital alive!"
Mr William Daley, the Vice-President's campaign chairman, said on Wednesday that he thought "there is a presumption that those members who are voting vote based upon the election. I believe the vast majority of them are legally bound. And I would assume if you're legally bound, you believe you're morally bound". "Looking down this list of people, something like that would really shock me," Mr Steve Mandernach, Comptroller of the Iowa State Democratic Party, told ABC of the idea of defecting. "These are all long-time activists who've been active members of the party."
Each state is allocated a number of electoral votes according to the size of its congressional delegation (two senators plus a varying number of representatives). The smallest states (and the District of Columbia) have three electoral votes each, while California has 54.
All but two states apply winner-takes-all. And, in theory, the system can produce bizarre results, including the mathematical possibility of being elected in a two-way fight with only 27 per cent of the popular vote. In practice, however, there have only been three cases where the college has gone against the popular vote, none this century and none by much.
Strict majoritarians point out that a Wyoming vote is in reality worth 2 1/2 times a Californian vote. But such features are not unusual in federal systems where the relative weights of small states are often enhanced.
There have been a few serious attempts to change the system, the last in 1969 when the House passed a bill to do so which was approved by President Nixon, but blocked in the Senate by the small states and the South.
The current election is already producing calls for a review although many politicians defend a system they say forces candidates to travel the country quite widely instead of concentrating on population centres.
Others argue that majoritarianism is now so prevalent as a political idea that an electoral college victory without a popular one would undermine the legitimacy of a president.
Mr Butler, an Irish-American from South Carolina, an Anglo-Irish immigrant and plantation owner, proposed the system to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 as a compromise.
Both James Madison and the Virginia delegation, and the small states canvassing for a New Jersey alternative, favoured systems which would leave the presidential election in the hands of Congress, a prospect which Butler said would encourage "cabal at home and influence from abroad". Dispersing the choice among the states would limit such possibilities, he argued.