If Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election, the next months would have been filled with a cycle of headlines about voter fraud. They would have stemmed from complaints from Republican leadership and lawsuits backed by powerful donors (along with a smattering of grassroots supporters).

We will not see those headlines. Sure, a few will comment on the lack of voter fraud. There will be a handful of cases of actual voter fraud. But we now live in a reality where the next months will not be consumed with coverage of lawsuits over frivolous claims of massive election-changing fraud in swing states favoring Democrats. Because Republicans won.

The run-up to the 2024 election, as with 2020, was rife with Republican claims that our voting system is not secure. (In some places, laws were changed to make it more difficult to vote.) Now that their candidate has won, the next months will be met with silence on the issue of voter fraud by those who would have been screaming at the top of their lungs if the election had swung the other way.

Had they lost, news outlets would have written about the tone and tenor of the screams, and sent reassurances to the choir that in fact, our elections are quite safe, and no, thousands of dead people did not vote.

There are some cases where it is easy to make sense of this conundrum. For example, when Antonin Scalia died, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to follow plain text in the Constitution and confirm a nominee for the Supreme Court. To defend his inaction he provided a wild argument: before an election was an inappropriate time to approve a nominee.

News outlets and pundits went mad spilling real and virtual ink dissecting McConnell’s “argument.” Was there precedent? What had the Founders thought? What new and fascinating doctrine of reading the Constitution was McConnell following?

It was never a real argument, it was only ever a political expedient. The truth to that lie was given when the same situation happened four years later, and with power in his hands, McConnell happily installed his side’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. Precedent did not matter, nor did the intentions of the Founders. The idea was an intellectually empty claim made by a plainly Machiavellian politician.

I have trouble applying the same logic to voter fraud. Sure, at the levels of power, politicians are only acting to meet the ends they want. The people running the super PACs, the lawyers paid by them, they all knew the dozens of lawsuits brought in 2020 to challenge the elections were frivolous.

The conundrum is the people. What explains the silence after so much preemptive worry? Where did all the anger and fear go? We know the answer is not that Republican voters think the laws that were changed to restrict voting worked to protect voter fraud, because in the alternate universe where Harris won, we know what the headlines would have included. Is it really so simple as they won, so they no longer care or worry about voter fraud?

Maybe it is that simple. When I was 20, I could not believe the unfairness of the drinking age. Readers will remember the refrain “I can die for my country but I can’t have a drink.” Then I turned 21, and suddenly, I did not care. Those poor sober 20-year-olds could pound sand.

Is that all that happened? A voter is genuinely concerned about fraud, but the election goes their way, so they no longer care? The drinking age is a serious discussion. Voting rights and voter fraud, more so. That the fraud is only a problem when a GOP candidate loses, while Harris has called the president-elect (a convicted felon and liable for sexual abuse) to congratulate him on his victory is upsetting, and frankly, a little terrifying.

What scares me is that this is an example that our reality has shifted, and we no longer argue about facts. Election integrity is not a topic for substantive discussion, it is a foil. Just as Republicans have listened to Trump’s lies and taken them as convenient truth, Democrats listen to Republicans, engage with empty beliefs, and wonder why Republicans are not convinced.

Let the lack of headlines about a stolen election be a reminder and a warning. Treating Republican arguments with integrity is to forget that the so-called party of law and order just elected Donald Trump.

For the next four years, do not engage with the insincere beliefs. You are being trolled, and our country is the butt of the joke. It is scary because there is nothing to win, yet everything to lose.

Tim Nixon, Ph.D., teaches criminal justice and lives in Amherst.