The saga surrounding the Nevada GOP’s efforts to undo their 2016 election losses by recalling Democratic state senators has taken another—potentially final—turn. The Silver State GOP’s attempts to recall Democratic Sens. Joyce Woodhouse and Nicole Cannizzaro are effectively dead.

News broke on Monday that the petitions circulated by Republicans to recall these Democratic lawmakers had insufficient valid signatures to trigger special elections to unseat and replace them. Notwithstanding a potential appeal of a related court ruling, the GOP’s long-running campaign to recall these women senators is over.

This news comes as little surprise after a court decision last month upheld the constitutionality of a state law allowing voters who signed recall petitions to change their minds and remove their names after the petitions are submitted to the state. Democrats had been running aggressive campaigns to urge petition signers, many of whom claim they were misinformed of the real purpose of the petitions, to ask to have their names removed.

Since the petition to recall Cannizzaro exceeded the required number of signatures by a margin of just 43, the ruling rendered that recall effort effectively dead. Similarly, the petition to recall Woodhouse exceeded the number of signatures required by about 200, so the signature removal requests—reportedly in the thousands—seemed certain to doom that effort, too. The news of Republicans’ failure to recall these Democrats is a satisfying ending to the state GOP’s desperate effort to undermine election results that might have rendered them the minority part in the state Senate until at least 2020.

Republicans lost the Nevada Senate in 2016, resulting in an effectively 12-9 chamber, and the GOP is understandably worried about flipping the chamber back this November. Only three of the 10 seats that are up this fall are held by Democrats, and all three went decisively blue in 2014. At the same time, of the six Republicans up in 2018, one represents a Clinton seat (51-43 percent), making it tough turf to defend.

So faced with a rough general election landscape, Republicans turned to sham recalls to oust two Democrats who’d just been elected and one independent who started caucusing with them this year (and isn’t even running for re-election). Using lies and distortions of voting records, Republicans gathered signatures to recall these three lawmakers—who all just happen to be women.

The recalls received significant funding support from a major national group: The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which works to elect GOP candidates to state offices (including legislatures), was the sole donor to one of the recall efforts, to the tune of $160,000. That recall petition failed miserably, so Republicans shifted $118,000 from that account to the recall efforts for the two Democrats. (The RSLC may have also contributed directly to those efforts, but we won’t know until those recall committees file finance reports.) So now it looks like Republicans will have to try to win back their Nevada Senate majority the old-fashioned way: via general elections.