Vote of no confidence

Even as Donald Trump, claiming the election will be rigged, enlists his supporters to serve as roving, untrained poll monitors in predominantly black inner cities, real abuses are rearing their ugly heads. And they are overwhelmingly making it harder for Democrats — specifically black voters in key swing states — to exercise the right to vote.

Lawsuits, long early-voting lines and emails reveal Republican Party apparatchiks from Wisconsin to North Carolina to Texas gaming the vote to keep Democrats far from the polls, in the name of combating vastly overhyped fears of “voter fraud.”

Thousands of voters, many African-American, were purged or almost purged from North Carolina voter rolls — violating federal law, the NAACP alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday.

In Green Bay, Wis., a Republican election clerk rejected a state lawmaker’s plea to put a polling place on a college campus, arguing, “I have heard it said that students lean more toward the Democrats.”

In San Antonio, poll workers called on early voters to get their identification cards out, even though a federal appeals court struck down a law requiring voters to present ID.

It’s the corrupt culmination of a long partisan campaign to make it tougher for certain reliable Democratic voters — cough, cough, black and Latino people — to vote.

Back in 2013, the state Legislature in North Carolina baldly set out to restrain African-American voting by demanding ID and cutting back on early voting, only to be blocked by federal courts for perpetrating unconstitutional “intentional racial discrimination” that targeted African-Americans “with almost surgical precision.”

Undeterred, election boards in 17 of North Carolina’s 100 counties limited early voting to a single polling place — resulting in predictably long lines and dampened turnout.

That body-blocking voters has emerged as a Republican tactic in state after state signals a party desperate to hold back the demographic tide in a multiracial, multiethnic nation.

The actual fraud, at least so far, is on the other foot. In Iowa, a registered Republican found herself facing a felony charge after attempting to vote a second time out of fear, fomented by her candidate, that her first Trump vote had magically turned to a Clinton one.

The stakes on Nov. 8 are immeasurably high for every American. Every registered voter who wishes to cast a ballot must be free to do so.