If past is prologue, a potentially long slog lies ahead counting the votes in Tuesday's two Senate runoff elections in Georgia. Regardless of the result, it's urgent that one thing not happen: Responsible Republicans everywhere must not allow the proliferation of corrosive lies and conspiracy tropes about vote fraud like those President Donald Trump has spread regarding the November elections in Georgia and other swing states.

The template Trump has created — of just baselessly crying "fraud" at any election outcome he doesn't like — will become a truly dangerous habit if Republicans don't break it now, starting with the results in Georgia.

Both Georgia's Senate seats are up for grabs because one of the sitting senators, Kelly Loeffler, was appointed in 2019 to fill a vacancy. Neither she nor fellow incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue garnered 50% of the vote in their respective elections on Nov. 3, nor did their challengers. So both seats had to go to runoff elections under Georgia law.

On Tuesday, Loeffler faced Democrat Raphael Warnock, and Perdue faced Democrat Jon Ossoff.

Trump did his best to taint Tuesday's process during an hour-long weekend phone conversation with Georgia's top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The president called into question the legitimacy of Tuesday's vote if Raffensperger didn't find a way to manipulate the Nov. 3 vote count in Trump's favor. That followed a Twitter rant last week that Georgia's Republican-run elections are "illegal and invalid."

Since the Senate is going into 2021 with a 50-48 split favoring Republicans, the Georgia outcome will decide which party controls the chamber. In a 50-50 split, the vice president, Kamala Harris, would break the tie. Undoing the damage Trump has done these past four years would be infinitely easier for President-elect Joe Biden if he has a Democratic Senate behind him.

Trump's beef poisoned the well for his fellow Republicans, Loeffler and Perdue, by potentially convincing Georgia Republican voters not to bother coming out for this "invalid" election. The irony is that, if the Democrats do take both seats with an unintentional assist from Trump, he would, of course, hold that victory up as final proof Georgia elections are rife with fraud.

That outcome would be a form of poetic justice, especially considering the two GOP senators' cowardly refusal to stand for democracy and call out Trump's election lies.

Trump's continued campaign of electoral destruction should never have been allowed to affect this Senate race — either way — no matter how much it might help the Democrats and the country. The Senate election was the first test of whether Trump's post-Nov. 3 lies have successfully damaged public faith in future elections enough to taint the outcomes. The implications for the nation are far more dire than the issue of who controls the Senate.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH