Donald Trump didn't reveal evidence of voter fraud on Thursday night. Instead, his speech was the culmination of a crisis he and Republicans manufactured as an excuse to take over elections.

Despite his lies, Trump does not actually want accurate voter rolls. He wants to decide which U.S. citizens can register and which cannot — who can cast a ballot and who is denied, and which elections are certified and which are rejected.

That is why he has pushed the SAVE Act, legislation that makes registering to vote much more burdensome. It is why he has falsely claimed that states are his agents for counting ballots. And it is what motivated his despicable speech.

For more than a decade, a bipartisan group of 32 states, plus Washington, D.C., maintained an interstate voter registration compact that facilitated the sharing of information. The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, existed to improve the accuracy of state voter rolls by sharing information among member states.

For example, if a voter moved to a new state, that information would be shared to ensure the person was removed from the rolls in the state they moved from. Similarly, if a voter dies, every ERIC member state gets notified if the deceased person is still on their rolls.

It was, by nearly all accounts, a big success — earning praise from Democratic and Republican election officials alike. Those concerned about duplicate or fraudulent registrations were among its supporters.

That is, until right-wing lies began circulating about ERIC following the 2020 election.

Louisiana left in 2022. But the real exodus of GOP-led states came in 2023 when, not coincidentally, Donald Trump posted on social media that "All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that 'pumps the rolls' for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up."

One by one, Republican states left ERIC — often over the strong objection of their own Republican election officials. Today, ERIC has only five Republican-controlled member states: Alaska, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Utah. Even that overstates GOP participation, since Kentucky has a Democratic governor.

The result has been predictable. Voter rolls have become less accurate as cross-state collaboration has decreased. Ironically, since nearly all Democratic-run states remain in ERIC, most of the deterioration in accuracy has been in Republican-controlled states.

As Republican states were leaving ERIC, I pointed out that this was part of an intentional plan to make state voter data less accurate. I argued that this was meant to create an excuse for Republicans to challenge elections and claim the need for more draconian voter suppression laws.

Since his return to office, Trump has proven me right.

He has been demanding control over state voter rolls. His Department of Justice has sued states to get them. Most recently, his administration has threatened election officials with prison, warning them of potential criminal penalties over noncitizen voting.

That escalation set the stage for Thursday night, when Trump delivered a primetime address claiming his administration had uncovered proof that the system is rigged. He said that the Department of Homeland Security had identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections. It's a staggering number — and it is not true.

The flawed matching process that inflates Trump’s numbers, the SAVE database, catches eligible, natural-born citizens in its net — voters who share a name with someone flagged in a database, or who naturalized after a record was last updated. A purge built on bad data doesn't catch fraud; it disenfranchises lawful voters. Sadly, for Trump, that is the point.

By weakening ERIC, Republicans have removed an outside check on Trump’s claims. It has also made the job of keeping clean voter rolls more difficult.

What we must realize is that this is not an accident. The campaign to degrade voter rolls didn't happen overnight. It was built brick by brick by a party intent on discrediting good election administrators and replacing them with election deniers.

Republicans aren't actually concerned with so-called election integrity. If that were a real concern, they would have remained members of ERIC.

Here's the truth: Trump and the Republicans only care about keeping power.

First, they turned to extreme gerrymandering. But with Trump's popularity in free fall, that is clearly not enough to hold control of the House, and it does nothing to prevent Democrats from flipping the Senate.

So they have had to escalate their voter suppression and election subversion tactics. They need to disenfranchise lawful voters at scale while targeting them with precision.

That has led us to the crisis we now face.

This is all part of a years-long campaign for GOP victory. So, while Republicans make sensational claims about dirty rolls, understand that they opted for this outcome so they could exploit it for political gain.

Republican leaders made a choice to leave ERIC — and the result was no accident.