With the predictability of sunrise and cicadas, Republican political candidates around the nation are now falsely crying "vote fraud" long before the first ballots are even cast. Recent examples of this preemptive big-lie strategy have been seen in California's recent recall election and in Republican primary campaigns elsewhere, and it's clearly becoming standard GOP procedure going forward. Former President Donald Trump's dark success at convincing his voters that they were robbed last year has provided a roadmap to other politicians who, like Trump, put their own cynical self-interest above the health of democracy. If they don't pay a price at the polls, democracy truly will be in trouble.

Before the 2020 election, Trump declared, ludicrously, that any outcome other than a Trump victory would be intrinsic proof of vote fraud. After the election, he declared victory before the ballots were counted, then refused to concede once his defeat was clear. He then personally meddled in states' vote verifications and sent his Keystone Kop squad of lawyers to make unfounded allegations that were laughed out of dozens of courts. For his crowning achievement, he incited a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an unprecedented attempt to overturn a valid election.

For Trump's democracy-damaging antics, his own party's leaders and followers should have driven him into the political wilderness. Instead, two-thirds of Republican voters now tell pollsters they believe Joe Biden was illegitimately elected — a belief with no more factual validity than the Loch Ness Monster. Republican-controlled state legislatures have responded by making it harder to vote and easier to overturn legitimate vote results in the future.

And now GOP candidates around the country are adopting Trump's fake-fraud strategy. In California's recall election, Republican challenger Larry Elder posted (apropos of nothing) a "Stop Fraud" page on his campaign site well before being soundly defeated by incumbent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Republican primary campaigns for various offices from Virginia to Nevada to Pennsylvania are similarly treating Democratic vote theft as a given, instead of the Tooth-Fairy nonsense that it is.

"The fever has not broken. If anything, it's spreading," one Republican election lawyer told Politico. "People I knew as rational and principled feel they have to say our elections are not reliable because polls show that is the ante for contested Republican primaries and motivating the base in general elections." Could there possibly be a more pathetic, un-American motive for undermining the credibility of America's elections?

It's not our elections that lack credibility — it's the ranting of an increasingly cynical party that is coming dangerously close to disavowing electoral democracy altogether. If GOP voters don't stop this madness in the primaries, then Democrats, independents and Republicans of conscience in the general elections must ensure that the party comes to regret nominating candidates who slander the ballot.

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