Months before the 2020 election, as tens of millions of people prepared to vote by mail in the midst of a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump was already laying the groundwork for challenging the result if it did not go his way. Mail ballots, he said in April, are “very dangerous” and “fraudulent in many cases.” In July, he warned that 2020 would be “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” In August, he told his followers that the “only way” he could possibly lose the election is if Democrats “rigged” it against him.

After the election, which Trump indeed lost in decisive fashion, his warnings only got more shrill, more dire, and more vaguely messianic. In December, he delivered a speech railing against the scourge of “corrupt forces … stuffing ballot boxes,” and blamed Biden’s victory on “fraud and abuse…on a scale never seen before.” His efforts to contest the outcome, Trump said, were “about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections”—a task that he said might prove to be his “single greatest achievement.”

Unfortunately for Trump, neither his initial legal challenges nor his subsequent efforts to incite a violent coup were sufficient to get him what he wanted. But as I predicted at the time, in Republican circles, Trump did manage to mainstream the belief that states that allow mail-in voting are at least facilitating cheating, if not outright encouraging it. Today, adherence to Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theories remains table stakes for anyone who aspires to be relevant in the Republican Party and/or the conservative legal movement.

Watson v. Republican National Committee, which the Supreme Court decided on Monday, reveals just how deeply election denialism is now embedded in the conservative consciousness. In Watson, a five-justice majority of the Court rejected the GOP’s challenge to a Mississippi law that allows officials to count absentee ballots received up to five days after Election Day, as long as the ballots are postmarked by Election Day. But Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh dissented, and in his opinion for the foursome, Alito warned of Watson’s “lamentable consequences”: Counting post-Election Day ballots, he said, is not only “blatantly contrary” to what federal law requires, but will also “further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections.”

Given that the 2026 midterms are about four months away, it is of course good that the Court declined to issue a decision that could disenfranchise tens of millions of mail voters, who tend to cast ballots for Democratic candidates. But it is deeply unnerving to learn that four of the Court’s nine members are willing to upend the electoral processes in more than half of states in service of their demented party leader’s most demented lie. As it turns out, the line between the Court preserving the status quo and the Court plunging the country into a chaotic, anti-democracy nightmare is a single vote.