The election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office has been the most controversial since the election of 2000, in which George W. Bush narrowly beat out Al Gore after being declared the winner of Florida, even though Bush lost the popular vote. Like the election of 2000, this year’s election ended with the loser of the popular vote winning the electoral vote, and thus the presidency. Moreover, Trump became notorious for the outlandish statements he made throughout his campaign, consequently drawing ire across the nation among those who did not support Trump. As a result, the election of Trump has caused friction amongst the members of the Electoral College.

Although the citizens of the United States voted in Donald Trump on November 8, the actual election takes place on December 19, when the electors convene to cast their votes for president according to how their respective state voted; if Donald Trump won, then Republican electors are sent to vote for that particular state. Likewise, if Hillary Clinton won, then Democratic electors are to vote. However, the electors are not obligated to vote for the candidate that they pledged to vote for; they can go rogue and cast their vote for another candidate. These are known as faithless electors.

Faithless electors have been a hot topic in recent weeks due to the aforementioned controversial nature of last month’s election. Many in the anti-Trump camp have been calling on electors to vote against Trump. As such, a group of Democratic electors, who have deemed themselves the “Hamilton Electors,” have concocted a plan to keep Trump away from the White House. They have been coalescing around moderate Republicans, most notably Ohio governor and former candidate for the Republican ticket John Kasich. With this strategy, the Hamilton Electors believe that they can draw enough Republican electors to at least cause Trump to drop below the required 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

However, they have been terribly unsuccessful with the task of convincing Republican electors to abandon Trump. Only two electors have come out against Trump, one of which resigned from his post. As such, only one Republican elector, Christopher Suprun from Texas, is known to be defecting against Trump. For Trump to dip below 270, the Hamilton Electors will have to convince 36 more Republican electors to vote against Trump.

This is where their plan starts to really fall apart. Considering that the election ended over a month ago and only one Republican has verbally defected, it seems highly unlikely that the Hamilton Electors will convince anywhere near the 36 additional Republicans required to keep Trump out of the White House.

Throughout the history of faithless electors, the common theme seems to be a small number of electors, if the number is larger than one, championing a lost cause with the blind hope that their going rogue will somehow change the results of the election. While this is not true for every faithless elector, like the 2004 Minnesota Democratic elector that voted “John Ewards” for president and John Edwards for vice president, instead of John Kerry and John Edwards, there are numerous examples of various extraneous causes being the reason why electors defected. One such example is when W.F. Turner, an Alabama Democratic elector in 1956, voted for Walter Jones, a local circuit judge notorious for his white supremacist ideals, and Herman Talmadge for president and vice president respectively, instead of the Democratic candidates Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver.

In fact, according to FairVote.org, faithless electors have never changed the outcome of an election. Electors like the Hamilton Electors and Christopher Suprun paint themselves as misguided delusional narcissists for thinking that their defecting from their pledges will produce any major impact on the election. Instead, like all faithless electors, they will be only be remembered in the footnotes of history.