THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Do not expect the GOP to let you register and vote. The laws designed to suppress your vote will still be enforced by people who say they haven't been told otherwise.

While Donald J. Trump repeatedly claims that the election is “rigged” against him, voting rights groups are increasingly battling something more concrete in this year’s ferocious wars over access to the ballot box: Despite a string of court victories against restrictive voting laws passed by Republican legislatures, even when voting rights groups win in court, they are at risk of losing on the ground.

In an election year when turnout could be crucial, a host of factors — foot-dragging by states, confusion among voters, the inability of judges to completely roll back bias — are blunting the effect of court rulings against the laws.

Last month in Texas, a federal court that invalidated that state’s voter ID law in July ordered recalcitrant state officials to change their public education campaign on new ID rules. The reason: Critics complained that the campaign muddied the central point of the court’s ruling, that voters without a state-approved ID could simply sign an affidavit to cast a ballot. In Kansas, the chief elections official, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, agreed last month to add nearly 20,000 properly registered voters to the state’s rolls only after being threatened with contempt of court.

And this month in North Carolina, plaintiffs complained to a judge that early-voting plans in five populous counties, including Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, embraced some of the same discriminatory practices that federal courts had outlawed this summer. That came after two senior Republican Party officials advised local elections boards in emails to choose polling places and voting hours that inconvenience minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.

To Barry Burden, who directs the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, such spats mirror a growing and worrisome use of election rules as tools to win elections, not run them fairly.

“When competition filters into making the rules themselves, it’s a recipe for disaster,” he said.

The courts’ effort to loosen voter ID laws “in practice so far has not fixed problems for voters facing special burdens to produce identification,” Richard L. Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law professor and elections expert, wrote in The Wisconsin Law Review last month.

The Republicans who devised the laws call them both fair and necessary. In federal court, lawyers for Wisconsin have called its election rules “voter friendly” compared with those of many states, and said the court’s voter ID order was so lax that any excuse for lacking proper identification documents, including that “the DMV is haunted,” was sufficient.

But the crux of the Republicans’ argument is less whimsical: Tough election laws, they argue, are needed to keep Democrats from stealing elections. “What I find is that leaders of the other party are against efforts to crack down on voter fraud,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, said in March. Numerous studies and surveys of voting show the opposite: Election fraud is rare, and the in-person fraud that the laws could prevent is virtually absent.

Wisconsin, too, has been hauled into court for failing to obey a judge’s order. On Oct. 7, after Judge James D. Peterson of Federal District Court read articles in The Nation and The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel documenting problems with the ID program, he summoned state officials to explain themselves.

The officials acknowledged flaws in the ID-issuing process and promised to fix them. But barely two weeks earlier, they had maintained in a report to the court that the ID process was running smoothly and that clerks in motor vehicle offices had been trained to deal with applicants.

That claim was belied when Molly McGrath, the national coordinator for the voting rights group VoteRiders, dispatched her mother to request help in getting an ID at 10 motor vehicle offices across the state. Few could navigate the application process. “They’re changing things so quick that it’s hard for us to keep up,” one clerk told her. Another, apparently unaware of the court’s order to issue IDs promptly, told her that “nothing’s guaranteed.”

Just too many people to throw in jail for engineering a long term effort to prevent the "wrong people" from voting.