Despite the wildly overstated anxieties of voting-rights activists, the expansion of the franchise is a one-way ratchet.

There’s one thing on which committed partisans on either side of the political divide can agree — or, at least, on which they pretend to agree for the benefit of their credulous audiences: American democracy is finished if they don’t get their way.

“If Trump doesn’t win, this is the last election,” billionaire entrepreneur and Trump booster Elon Musk recently told podcast host Joe Rogan. “I think you’re right,” his Trump-endorsing interlocutor agreed.

Neither dwelled on the sequence of events that would bring the Republic down around them, nor did they speculate on the mechanisms that would be used to subvert Article I of the U.S. Constitution. To do so might have spoiled whatever fun can be found in naïve catastrophism.

For her part, Kamala Harris’s surrogate, Oprah Winfrey, mirrored the pair’s passionate incuriosity. “If we don’t show up tomorrow,” she told a crowd of Harris backers amassed in front of the famous steps leading to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “it is entirely possible we won’t be able to cast a ballot again.”

Is it? How? Will the Constitution be overturned? Is it conceivable that the Congress and two-thirds of the states ratify amendments adulterating or repealing the 15th, 19th, 24th, or 26th Amendments expanding voting rights? No? Then what on earth is she talking about?

A forgiving sort might accuse me of being uncharitable. We’re not supposed to take heavy-breathing political guerrillas literally — certainly not at the latest stages of a national campaign when the time for persuasion is behind us. This is staple hyperbole designed to either incite unenthusiastic potential voters to the polls or to ratify the rationalizations to which committed partisans on either side of the electoral equation are already devoted. Don’t overthink it.

But just because political hobbyists think this behavior is best practice, that doesn’t make it any less stupid. It’s not hard to find similar garment-rending over the Hobbesian ordeal that surely awaits us on the other side of this candidate or the other’s victory. But there will be another election. Lots of them, in fact, at every level of government and all year long.

There will be municipal elections and school-board elections, special and off-year elections, midterm elections, and, of course, general elections — to say nothing of the primaries that feed an endless supply of ambitious private citizens into these electoral hoppers. The Founders, in their wisdom, bequeathed to us a system of government rife with elections, which were envisioned as the instrument through which the public would register its policy preferences. Elections and your right to participate in them aren’t going anywhere.

You have to grudgingly admire the indefatigability of the sort of activist who can still summon the enthusiasm to retail apocalypticism with a straight face, but it’s a low-stakes game. No one is ever asked to account for whatever happened to the last epochal cataclysm. Good things happen. Bad things happen. But despite the wildly overstated anxieties of voting-rights activists, the expansion of the franchise is a one-way ratchet.

The activist class may be happy to retreat from their motte (this is the last election) to the safety of a more defensible bailey (this state pared back early in-person voting from twelve to seven days), but we’ve become too lax in our policing of that kind of dishonesty. It is predatory. It prays on voters’ apprehension — nakedly and with wholesale disregard for propriety and the intelligence of those who are privy to that sort of agitation.

There’s always another election. And deep down, the folks who insist that all that stands between us and a nightmarish hellscape in which the living will envy the dead know it. They hope you can be made to subordinate rationality to fervor. We should probably take more exception to that than we do.