Fake News and the Electoral College: The “Animal House” ploy. By James Taranto.

Electors from the 30 states Donald Trump carried are being “hounded to abandon” the president-elect and cast a vote for somebody else when they meet Monday, the Associated Press reports. The effort will not succeed:

Whether they like Trump or not, and some surely don’t, scores of the Republicans chosen to cast votes in the state-capital meetings told AP they feel bound by history, duty, party loyalty or the law to rubber-stamp their state’s results and make him president.

A team of nine AP reporters attempted to contact all 538 electors from both parties, and was successful in reaching “more than 330 of them. . . . Only one Republican elector told AP he won’t vote for Trump. . . . Even a leader of the anti-Trump effort, Bret Chiafalo of Everett, Washington, calls it a ‘losing bet.’ ” The GOP defector is almost certainly Chris Suprun of Texas, who announced his intention last week in a New York Times op-ed piece.

Some of the details are entertaining:

“Let me give you the total as of right now: 48,324 emails about my role as an elector,” said Brian Westrate, a small-business owner and GOP district chairman in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. …

Most of the pleas to reject Trump are coordinated, automated, professionally generated and, for those reasons, none too persuasive.

Call it the “Animal House” ploy, after this exchange from the classic 1978 comedy: “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!” “We’re just the guys to do it.”