This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

“The election is going to be rigged—I’m going to be honest,” Donald Trump said to a rowdy crowd in August, at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote ten times, maybe,” Trump told an interviewer later. A few days afterward, in Pennsylvania, where Trump was then lagging by nine points in the polls, he warned supporters that “the only way we can lose . . . is if cheating goes on.” That week, a new page appeared on his campaign Web site, inviting concerned citizens to volunteer to be “Trump Election Observers” so that they could “help me stop Crooked Hillary from rigging this election!”

At the first Presidential debate, Trump and Hillary Clinton were asked whether they would accept the ultimate outcome of the election. Trump evaded the question at first, before winkingly conceding that he would. But after the debate he went right back to his routine—more talk of rigging. Those polls that said Clinton had won the debate? They were skewed against him, he said, just like Google was, with its suspiciously pro-Clinton search results. At campaign stops this week, Trump reiterated his claims that Clinton was out to steal the vote. He even told the Times that he was reconsidering whether he'd accept a Clinton victory at all.

As my colleague Amy Davidson has discussed, Republicans have spent years, beginning well before Trump’s campaign, warning voters that devious people were trying to cast illegitimate ballots to swing elections. They gave the problem a tidy, intuitive-sounding name: voter fraud. But, in an especially toxic political gambit, Trump has taken this concept to the extreme: trying to delegitimize a national election even while campaigning for the Presidency.

By now, it seems almost quaint to point out that voter fraud in the United States is vanishingly rare. Yet the facts are clear. When Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, tracked cases of alleged voter impersonation—that is, someone pretending to be someone else at the polls—between 2000 and August of 2014, he found just thirty-one incidents, out of more than a billion ballots cast in general, primary, special, and municipal elections during that period. Another investigation, by a national reporting project based at Arizona State University called News21, found two thousand and sixty-eight alleged election-fraud cases between 2000 and the summer of 2012. Ten of them were voter-impersonation cases; the others were related to absentee ballots and voter registration. (The over-all numbers amounted to roughly one malign impersonator out of every fifteen million potential voters.) In-person voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in part because it’s a laughably inefficient way to affect the outcome of an election. The penalties are steep—hefty fines, even jail time—while the actual gains, in terms of extra votes, are minimal.

Not that these findings will sway Trump—in fact, his arguments about election fraud also long predate his current campaign. On Election Night in 2012, he tweeted, “This election is a total sham and travesty. We are not a democracy.” Two years later, he was at it again, this time with a nativist twist. “Crazy - Election officials saying that there is nothing stopping illegal immigrants from voting,” he tweeted the Friday before the midterms. “This is very bad (unfair) for Republicans!”

Last summer, as Trump’s campaign was ramping up, he reportedly received a thirteen-page strategy memo from a trusted adviser named Roger Stone. One of Stone’s suggestions to Trump was that he should emphasize that the “system is rigged against the citizens.” In the spring, as Republican Party élites were growing visibly concerned about Trump’s early success, he began attacking the primary process as a "rigged, disgusting dirty system.” The Republican Party, he said, was playing favorites with candidates close to the establishment. He homed in on his main rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, portraying them as Party insiders who couldn't be trusted. “Word is-early voting in FL is very dishonest," he tweeted on the afternoon of March 12th, three days before the Florida primary. “Little Marco, his State Chairman, & their minions are working overtime-trying to rig the vote.” The Trump campaign and its surrogates went on to level similar charges against Ted Cruz in Texas and several other states. Stone later explained Trump's endgame on a right-wing radio show: “He needs to say . . . ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’ ”

The idea of a “rigged” election doesn’t just give Trump’s ego the excuse it needs if his candidacy falls short—it also resonates with his backers. A recent Washington Post poll showed that half of Trump’s supporters don’t think the election will be fair. These numbers track with years of growing concern among voters generally, and Republicans specifically, about the reliability of American election results. In 2012, only thirty-one per cent of Americans polled by Pew Research Center had confidence that the votes in that year’s election had been “accurately counted.” Among Republicans, the number was twenty-one per cent. According to an Associated Press poll released last Saturday, half of Republicans now believe there is "a great deal of fraud in American elections.”

Republicans themselves have stoked this paranoia. Over the past decade, Republican officeholders in dozens of states have used the threat of voters casting multiple or illegitimate ballots to justify imposing onerous identification requirements at the voting booth, measures that have often gone hand in hand with efforts to shorten early-voting periods before Election Day. An estimated eleven per cent of eligible voters, more than twenty million people, do not have any form of government-issued photo I.D., and minority and lower-income citizens, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates, are disproportionately represented in that group. (As are college-age voters and the elderly.) A number of Republican Party officials from across the country have actually admitted to manipulating the threat of voter fraud to their advantage.

As a Presidential candidate, Trump has stirred his core supporters by bad-mouthing immigrants, taunting Latinos, and calling for a nationwide imposition of stop-and-frisk. Meanwhile, studies suggest that the raft of recent state-led voter-suppression efforts will help him and his party tamp down on the negative impact of his bluster, by depressing turnout in the very communities that have borne the brunt of Trump's vitriol. The Brennan Center for Justice recently counted fourteen states that will have new voting restrictions in effect this fall. In some of these states—Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee—the laws include strict photo-I.D. requirements; in others, such as Ohio and Nebraska, the period of early voting has been shortened.

It’s easy to forget the cynicism and stealth of systemic tactics like these when Trump claims that the whole structure of American democracy is a sham. It’s easier still to forget that he is simply repeating, in a louder and shriller voice, what the Republican Party has been saying for years. Trump is a maximalist: he takes what he hears and resizes it to his own—huge—personal needs. He may have weaponized the old Republican talking points, but on the subject of voting rights Trump’s still just toeing the party line.

Previously in the series: Margaret Talbot on the “lying” media, John Cassidy on Trump’s charitable giving, Jelani Cobb on black outreach as campaign ploy, Jia Tolentino on Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, Adam Davidson on the interest-rate flip-flop, Adam Gopnik on conspiracy theories, Adam Davidson on the unemployment-rate hoax, and Eyal Press on immigration and crime.