For the past few months, Republicans have perpetuated the false narrative that non-citizens are voting illegally in droves for Democrats this cycle, while Donald Trump and his supporters are producing voter fraud hysteria that they can point to if they lose next week. .

Republican state officials across the country have supported the effort by announcing various voter roll removal programs and legal challenges to remove suspected noncitizens from the rolls in recent weeks and months — ominously close to the election.

However, one by one, courts quickly shut down these programs and dismissed lawsuits alleging problems with voter rolls. The blanket dismissals only reinforced the idea that the GOP’s myths of non-citizen voting were ever just a messaging campaign aimed at a one-man audience.

“Whenever someone makes the claim that non-citizens are voting in our elections, it’s not based on the facts,” Andrew Garber, an advisor to the Brennan Center’s Voting and Election Rights Program, told TPM. “And it seems to lead to a different narrative, which is election denial, which is trying to make it look like there are problems so that it can be used to challenge election results that they don’t like.”

Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked GOP Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s recent efforts to remove alleged noncitizens from voter rolls just before the election. In August, Youngkin signed Executive Order 35, removing more than 6,000 suspected non-citizens from voter rolls, and also announced the state’s new program to remove suspected non-citizens from voter rolls. Voting rights activists filed a lawsuit in federal court earlier this month, claiming the program directly violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and has the potential to disenfranchise eligible voters.

U.S. District Court Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles agreed with the plaintiffs last week, saying in her order that the program does violate the NVRA’s 90-day silence period, which prohibits voter registration cancellation or any systematic program of maintaining lists that is implemented within 90 days of an election.

A federal appeals court on Sunday upheld the judge’s rulingrefusing to reinstate the program and restore the voter registrations of those who were purged. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares wrote about X On Sunday, “Virginia will immediately appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.” State officials Monday he asked the high court to intervene.

Garber also described the call as a simple “messaging effort.”

“I think a lot of it is the messaging effort and a lot of it is trying to have something to turn to if they don’t like the election results,” he said.

Earlier this month, a federal judge rejected a lawsuit by the Republican National Committee seeking access to Michigan voter rolls to remove allegedly ineligible voters. The suit alleged that the state, in violation of the NVRA, was not keeping accurate voter rolls. However, U.S. District Court Judge Jane M. Beckering pent-up that the case was not right.

And last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen’s (R) voter purge program, which was designed to remove suspected non-citizens from voter rolls. The Department of Justice filed suit against the state of Alabama and Allen, arguing that the program violated the NVRA. U.S. District Court Judge Anna Manasco ruled in September that the program, like Virginia’s, also violated the NVRA’s 90-day quiet period.

The most glaring problem with these citizenless voting efforts is timing. If non-citizen voting and maintaining voter rolls is as big a problem as Republicans claim—which the experts explained time and time again that it isn’t – why did republicans wait so long to fix it? The answer, of course, is that there’s no real problem with widespread noncitizen voting or maintaining voter rolls, said David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Research and Innovation. These various efforts are just attempts to sow distrust in the electoral system should Trump lose next month, he said.

“There is good reason to be suspicious of why these cases were filed when they were filed,” Becker said, “and that’s knowing they were almost certainly going to lose. And that’s because more is being done to fuel false claims about stealing an election that they probably expect their candidate to lose.”

Justin Levitt, an election law researcher and professor at LMU Loyola Los Angeles School of Law, also pointed out that the fact that courts have so quickly shut down these programs and dismissed lawsuits challenging voter rolls is just evidence that the judicial system works as it should.

“This is exactly what you would expect, that programs that are clearly illegal and known to be clearly illegal are being shut down and they are being shut down quickly,” he said. “Despite the efforts of a few to sow confusion and disorder, the most important thing for the public to know, the most important thing for voters to know, is that attempts to create chaos do not work.”