Today, 538 members of the Electoral College will meet in state capitols across the United States formally to elect the next president and vice president.

It’s a formality of course, although less so than normal, yet the existence of this rather opaque body of men and women highlights the political divisions that have only grown since last month’s election, not least the gap between the popular vote and the balance within the college.

Most Electors are expected, yet not obliged, to vote according to the popular majority in their respective states. So Hillary Clinton ought to receive 232 votes and the president-elect 306, although at least one Republican has vowed not to support Donald Trump, but instead another GOP candidate. If 36 other electors change their votes, then the Donald could be denied the presidency.

Some are rather quixotically looking to their founding fathers for guidance. Democrat electors, for example, have tried to forge an alliance with Republicans calling themselves the “Hamilton Electors”, drawing inspiration from US statesman Alexander Hamilton’s article on the “mode of electing the president” from the Federalist Papers.

This alluded to the process affording “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”. “Talents for low intrigue,” Hamilton went on to say, “and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single state; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole union.”

Of course that doesn’t quite say the Electoral College has the right to reject the President elect, but such is the frustration about Trump having got this far. The documentary-maker Michael Moore, for example, speculated a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t survive today’s vote. He highlighted what he called the “unbearable” irony of a candidate who said “racist” things during the campaign benefiting from an 18th-century law intended “to placate the slave states”.

Christopher Suprun, that “faithless” Republican elector I mentioned earlier, argued in the New York Times that he and other members of the Electoral College were compelled to decided whether “candidates are qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence”.

That last point has been particularly pertinent over the past week, as often astonishing details have emerged of the extent of Russian influence, via computer hacking, in the recent election campaign. A few days ago Secretary Clinton said the attacks were intended to “undermine” American democracy and had been personally ordered by Vladimir Putin because of a “personal beef” against her.

Apparently an incident back in 2008 still plays badly in Moscow. While a New York Senator, Clinton mocked President George W Bush’s claim that he had looked into Mr Putin’s soul. “I could have told him — he was a KGB. agent,” she quipped. “By definition, he doesn’t have a soul.” It seems elephants, particularly Russian ones, don’t forget.

Clinton blames Moscow’s view of her and the FBI’s conduct regarding its emails investigation for her defeat last month, while President Obama says he ordered his Russian counterpart to “cut it out” in a conversation about the email hacking ahead of polling day. He also claims to have warned Putin, somewhat ineffectively, of serious “consequences” were it to continue.

Otherwise, however, what has emerged from media investigations into the hacking is a catalogue of missed signals, sluggish responses from official agencies in the US, Democratic complacency and a tendency to underestimate the seriousness of the campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

For American voters of a certain age, this must resonate. Last week the New York Times illustrated an in-depth report about the hacking story with a photograph taken at the DNC headquarters in Washington. This showed a filing cabinet broken into in 1972 as part of the Watergate burglary sitting alongside a computer server that Russian hackers had breached during the 2016 campaign.

A few days ago I saw a retrospective of the Glaswegian photographer Harry Benson’s work, which included a striking juxtaposition of two images: a double portrait of the Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein and, above, a shot of Richard Nixon announcing his resignation surrounded by family at the White House. What can seem initially insignificant – i.e. break-ins physical or digital – can have huge ramifications further down the line.

The President-elect’s response has been instructive. A few days ago he poured scorn on US intelligence claims that Russian hackers possibly helped swing the election in his favour, calling them ridiculous and politically-motivated. “Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card,” tweeted Trump. “It would be called conspiracy theory!”

It wasn’t exactly a denial, but then not only has Trump often appeared like a fully paid-up member of the Putin fan club, but so too are many Republicans. Obama expressed bewilderment about this in his first substantive response to the allegations, saying that Ronald Reagan would be rolling “over in his grave” given his Cold War battles against the Soviet Union and admittedly cruder forms of espionage.

Obama has urged his successor to support a bipartisan investigation into Russian cyber intrusion, although that seems unlikely to be taken up. There’s little use pointing out the obvious hypocrisy: throughout the recent campaign Trump and his supporters lost little opportunity to depict Clinton’s email troubles as the biggest scandal since Watergate, but when something comes along that’s truly worthy of such hyperbole, it’s dismissed and explained away.

Of course Democrats, particularly their defeated candidate, have to be careful how they play this, although it’s become clear that Obama’s fear of appearing to “politicise” the affair was at least partly responsible for Washington’s sluggish and low-key response. Clinton took care to emphasise that we were “well beyond normal political concerns”, but rather the “integrity” of US democracy and the “security of our nation” was at stake.

That might be so, but it cannot realistically fall to the Electoral College to determine something of that magnitude. Most electors are bound, if not by law then precedent, and the majority will endorse the President-elect. And as usual, the predictably cyclical debate about whether the popular vote ought to be filtered in this way has come and gone. Sure, both Trump and Clinton called for the Electoral College to be abolished just a few years ago, but who cares about that?