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Voters in Wisconsin have scored a major victory for democracy. Yes, the Democratic Party benefited from their effort, but that’s not the main point. The real winner was the American system itself.

The Republican Party in Wisconsin tried mightily to rig an election in favor of Judge Daniel Kelly, a right-wing ideologue on the state supreme court who was strongly endorsed by President Trump. They even won a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority to limit mail-in voting, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted would “result in massive disenfranchisement.”

But all their efforts to thwart the popular will failed. Challenger Jill Karofsky crushed Kelly by more than 160,000 votes. As conservative strategist Matt Batzel lamented to the New York Times, “the left organized a historic number of absentee ballot requests.” Others risked infection from the coronavirus to vote in person.

Wisconsin is only the first skirmish in a critical conflict that will be fought from now through Election Day. Republicans across the country are trying desperately to thwart voter turnout, especially among minorities and young people, who tilt heavily against them. Former Attorney General Eric Holder put it this way in the Times: “Wisconsin is just a microcosm. And it presents questions that the nation will soon have to grapple with. It’s a test of our democracy. And the question is, ‘Are we up to passing that test?’”

This is not a new fight. Republicans have long known they are facing what Sen. Lindsey Graham calls a “demographic death spiral.” When Ronald Reagan won in 1980, the electorate was 88% white; by 2016, whites represented only 71% of the voting public, and that rate will continue to decline.

A candid self-analysis by the GOP after the 2012 election concluded, “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate that we care about them, too.” But instead of heeding that advice, the party has followed a very different strategy: maximizing their share of the white vote — partly by using racial and nativist appeals — while trying to minimize the impact of minorities by discouraging their participation.

“For the better part of two decades, Republicans have sought to tighten voting restrictions,” reports the Times, “pushing stringent new voter identification requirements and sweeping voter roll purges that disproportionately affected people of color, the poor and the young.”

That approach worked once for Trump: He squeezed out a narrow victory by winning 57% of the white votes, while attracting only 1 in 5 minority votes. Whether he succeeds again will depend heavily on the scurrilous suppression strategy Republicans used in Wisconsin and are preparing to deploy in other swing states.

The GOP has long justified their strategy by citing voter fraud, but that argument itself is a fraud — a flat-out lie. “Studies have shown that all forms of voting fraud are extremely rare in the United States,” states the Times. Trump’s own commission to study voter fraud disbanded after finding no evidence to support the president’s outlandish claims.

And yet Trump is at it again, telling a White House briefing that “mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters.” That’s totally false, but it’s also not the real reason for his opposition to mail-in ballots. And everyone knows it.

After thwarting efforts by congressional Democrats to expand mail-in voting in the economic stimulus package, Trump admitted to Fox News: “They had levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

There it is, folks: the vicious, unvarnished truth. Republicans want to stop people who disagree with them from voting. Suppression is their strategy, and the “massive disenfranchisement” Justice Ginsburg warned about is their goal. Instead of trying to win over nonwhite voters, they’re ruthlessly winnowing them out of the pool.

To be completely fair, election experts agree that mailin ballots are more subject to fraud than in-person voting. In 2018, a congressional election in North Carolina was overturned after a Republican operative tried to corrupt the process. But five states already have mail-in systems, and have developed anti-fraud strategies — from ballot tracking to prepaid envelopes and ballot drop boxes — that work extremely well.

Holder is right: The coming election will be “a test of our democracy.” Wisconsin voters met that challenge by defying Republican efforts to impede their voting. This year, the best way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage is for more voters in more states to follow their example.