The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who has repeatedly articulated his contempt for voting rights, laid the blame for the election fraud debacle on Democrats and their refusal to back voter ID laws. This was catnip for the Republican base, which has been convinced that voter fraud happens regularly. And Mr. McConnell managed to swap the reality of election fraud for the fiction of voter fraud to mask that it was the Republican who hired the disreputable campaign operative.

Mr. McConnell’s legerdemain also hid the fact that voter ID would have had no effect whatsoever on Mr. Dowless’s scheme because government-issued photo IDs are not required for absentee voting in North Carolina.

Republicans in North Carolina’s state legislature, instead of addressing the obvious weaknesses in the absentee ballot procedure, or heeding a past court warning about the rampant racial discrimination in its voting laws, doubled down and continued to deploy the lie of voter fraud to craft yet another piece of voter ID legislation.

Although it was stopped by a court, the targets of the new law, as before, were African-Americans, whose voter turnout rate had surpassed that of whites in 2012 but dropped significantly after the state implemented voter suppression legislation in 2013. The result of the statehouse’s new efforts, as an editorial in The Charlotte News & Observer noted, would most likely have resulted “in hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters.”

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Who thinks this only happened in the 9th district in North Carolina?

If they make enough noise about voter fraud, the deplorables who are stirred up by it will never notice the election fraud made possible by the voter ID laws that get pushed.