Long before Donald Trump began talking about rigged elections, Republicans have told Americans that we urgently need to protect the integrity of the vote. There’s fraud out there, they’ve said, and there’s enough of it to warrant measures such as Voter IDs.

But in perhaps the most closely scrutinized election in history, a heartening and instructive truth has emerged: people don’t want to cheat nearly as much as GOP lawmakers say.

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, certainly have been looking. Poll watchers have dutifully showed up at precincts across the country, and observers were dispatched to keep an eye the processing and counting of ballots in states with close presidential results. Republican officials also set up hotlines where people could report suspected shenanigans, and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick even offered a minimum of $25,000 to anyone in the country “who provides information that leads to an arrest and final conviction of voter fraud.”

If there was an election in which the GOP could prove widespread voter fraud instead of just imagining it, 2020 was it.

Instead, Americans learned what experts had long told us. Election fraud is rare, and the kind of fraud that Voter ID would address – people going to a precinct and attempting to vote as someone else – is almost non-existent. As of Thursday, the Trump campaign and other Republican interests have filed more than 30 election lawsuits in 6 states. No court has found a single instance of fraud.

That shouldn’t be a surprise. One exhaustive study of 12 years of elections in five states found only 500 cases of alleged voter fraud. In 2016, North Carolina’s Board of Elections found that 4,769,640 votes were cast in November and that one would probably have been avoided with a voter ID law.

Voters should also find comfort with election systems, despite the president’s false charges of rigged machines. In a joint statement last week, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Election Assistance Commission and groups that represent the chief election officers in every state said that: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Does that mean there was zero voter fraud? No. Among the 150 million-plus votes cast in 2020, there were a handful of instances of people voting illegally or double voting. But when the New York Times contacted officials in each state, none reported anything resembling widespread or concerning levels voter fraud.

In fact, the most notable threat to 2020 election integrity has come from not from voters or voting machines, but Republican officials. From Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina inexplicably asking the Georgia Secretary of State about tossing ballots to the president and his supporters pushing for the non-certification of millions of legitimate votes, it’s clear and shameful that officials in one party have no issue with disenfranchising voters if it will bring victory.

That’s fraudulent, too, by the way. But it’s not new. In North Carolina, Republican lawmakers have spent the past decade pushing for measures that make it harder for their opponents’ supporters to cast a ballot. They crafted a 2013 grab bag of voter suppression measures, including new voter identification requirements, that a federal court threw out because it deliberately diluted the power of Black voters and targeted them with “almost surgical precision.” They’ve had a subsequent attempt at Voter ID blocked by state and federal judges because of the possibility of discriminatory intent. A federal appeals court heard oral arguments on that law in September.