Yesterday Samantha Bee ran a hilarious little "gotcha" segment featuring Trump supporters who claim that Democrats have "rigged" the election in favor of their nominee, Hillary Clinton.

The election is rigged, they claim, unless Trump wins. In which case, the election was "rigged" against him, but not "rigged" in the sense that "rigged" actually means.

Here, as they often do, Trump supporters abuse one of language's greatest qualities—its mutability, its multifacetedness—to justify their status as underdogs who are also supposedly top dogs. The only way to square their circle, meaning-wise, is to believe they mean the election is "rigged" in a literal way if Trump loses, but "rigged" in a figurative way if Trump wins. To meet the idea with a generosity of spirit that it does not deserve, the figurative "rigging" they're talking about is "the Media's constant "Trump bashing." To counter that bias, one of the supporters said he signed up to be a "poll watcher" (😏) so that he can try to convince people in line to vote for Trump.

God help us.

I have to say, though, that this "rigged" argument sounds AWFULLY familiar.

If you can remember all the way back to the Democratic National Convention, a number of Bernie delegates threw up their arms and decried the "rigged" system that they fully participated in. Many Sanders supporters at the time pointed to alleged voter fraud in Arizona, among other places. But even if you gave Sanders the votes they say he lost to "fraud," it wouldn't have been enough to overcome the fact that 3.7 million more people voted for Hillary than for Sanders.

The other Trump supporters Bee's squad interviews reveal that these people have no real knowledge of the actual strategies used to rig elections. Elections are being rigged, but not to repress the votes of Trump's white constituency.

In August of 2013, North Carolina passed HB-589, a voting bill explicitly designed to suppress the African-American vote in the state. This isn't "hacking the voting booth"-type rigging, just some ol' fashioned, totally legal, Jim Crow-level disenfranchisement. According to this incredible piece of reporting in the Washington Post:

Longtime Republican consultant Carter Wrenn, a fixture in North Carolina politics, said the GOP’s voter fraud argument is nothing more than an excuse.

“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.

“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit overturned a district court's decision to uphold the law, but individual counties are taking advantage of loopholes to enforce many of the law's voting restrictions.

If Hillary Clinton wins North Carolina on election day, by the way, the contest is over.