At the federal level, Republican politicians were mum. When Mr. Trump was asked about the fraud, he deflected, turning to a baseless conspiracy theory about a million fraudulent Democratic votes in California. When a reporter asked the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, about it, he shifted the blame to Democrats.

It turned out that even the local U.S. attorney, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, had failed to act on warnings by the state elections board that Mr. Dowless had stolen votes in a different race two years before. Instead, the attorney’s office went on a fishing expedition for fraud committed by immigrants, under the guidance of Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time.

As I learned, the Republicans take a conveniently uneven approach to fraud. They claim that voters commit fraud, even though it almost never happens, but when one of their own was caught committing fraud against the voters, they weren’t concerned. In fact, it’s important to see their talk of “voter fraud” for what it is: one more page from the Republican Party’s elections playbook, not all that different from its efforts to selectively restrict voting.

Right now, at the state level, administration-loyal Republicans are pushing technical changes to election laws that seem small but are big enough to tilt close elections in their favor: for example, purging infrequent voters (who tend to lean Democratic) from the rolls and making it easier to reject absentee ballots (which burdens young people and minorities in the Democratic base). In Wisconsin, it was Republicans who fought against postponing the primary election and extending mail-in voting. And look what happened: In Milwaukee, a coronavirus hot spot, only five of 180 polling sites were open; black and Hispanic voters suffered overwhelmingly.

Republicans’ voter suppression should come as no surprise. It’s long been part of the party’s playbook in places like North Carolina, where the Republican-controlled legislature cut back early in-person voting, imposed vicious racial and partisan gerrymandering in districts like mine, and passed a voter ID law that a court found would “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

In my election, had a few brave volunteers and I not fought like hell for justice, the Republican Party would have gotten away with stealing a federal election. And they could steal November’s election, too — when it won’t just be a potentially close presidential race at stake, but also control of the U.S. Senate and state legislatures, which will oversee the next round of redistricting.