Trump won the 2016 election on a technicality.

[Tommy Carcetti]

44. Not necessarily.

Each candidate on the ballot will have his or her own a slate of electors. They are overwhelmingly expected (although not legally required) to vote for that candidate during the electoral college process.

Which slate of electors gets chosen depends on which candidate is the winner of that state's certified popular vote.

This is where Trump ran into trouble in 2020. Georgia, Pennsylvania, etc. certified Biden as the winner. Therefore, the official electors were Biden electors who ultimately voted Biden during the electoral process. What Trump wanted to do is basically say screw the certified vote, here are my own electors and those will get counted when Congress certifies the final count on January 6th. He even argued that the Republican legislatures of those states should also say screw the certified vote, we're sending the Trump elector votes to Congress on January 6th.

That of course is not how it works and is indeed illegal to conspire to subvert the vote like that.

Now, if you remember 2016, you might remember this wonderful pipe dream that some of us here had (even myself in the most blissful recesses of my mind) that maybe, just maybe, some of those electors from the states that Trump won (i.e. Trump's slate electors) could just say, "You know, screw it. Hillary won the popular vote. We're just going to vote Hillary instead."

That actually was not illegal because electors are not technically required to vote for the candidate in which they are part of a slate.

But they almost always do. So that just wouldn't have happened, except in our happiest of dreams.