Is anyone else suffering from a case of whiplash?

With Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump raising the specter of voter fraud in advance of the Nov. 8 Presidential election, GOP officials here and across the country are in damage control mode. Our elections, beset by years of claims among Republicans of widespread voter fraud, have suddenly never been more above board.

Rob Gleason, chairman of the state Republican Party, told National Public Radio that if Trump loses, “it will be because he didn’t get enough votes.”

Sound logic. It certainly won’t be because of voter fraud. A study of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases in 50 states between 2000 and 2012 by the journalism project News21 found 10 cases of voter impersonation among the 146 million voters registered over that 12 year period. Out of more than 1 billion ballots cast from 2000 through 2014, there were 31 credible reports of voter impersonation, according to a Loyola Law School review.

As Jennifer Clark of New York’s Brennan Center told NBC News in August: “Basically every analysis that has ever been done has concluded it (voter fraud) is not a significant concern.”

The real problem here is that recent years have been very good to Republicans as they pressed their case that exactly the opposite was true.

In 2012, Gleason penned an op-ed for the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat warning voters in Cambria County that their votes “might not be counted,” because of voting irregularities found by an audit of some Philadelphia-area voting precincts after that year’s primary election. It was enough to set the GOP leader to publicly fretting about the implications of what he said was “clearly fraud,” as he argued in favor of Republicans’ Voter ID law.

“What if this audit was expanded throughout Pennsylvania?” Gleason wondered. “How many more cases might we find?”

After President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney at the polls that fall, Gleason found a silver lining, telling the Pennsylvania Cable Network that attention on the law — which wasn’t yet in effect, and was subsequently struck down by a Commonwealth Court judge — had done its real job: cutting into the Democrat’s margin of victory.

“(We) cut Obama by 5 percent, which was big,” Gleason told PCN. “I think that probably photo ID helped a bit in that.”

Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, locked in a tight and monstrously expensive race with Democrat Katie McGinty this year, has never been more certain that Pennsylvania elections are rock solid and legitimate.

“Our elections may not always be completely perfect, but they are legitimate,” Toomey said during Monday night’s debate in Pittsburgh. “Everyone needs to respect the outcome.”

Of course, in 2012 Toomey told The Washington Post in an interview that putting a Voter ID law on the books was vital to “protect the integrity” of those same elections. The law’s gone, yet somehow the integrity remains?

Toomey, Gleason and other Republicans who for years sold snake oil about the need for Voter ID laws did thier jobs well. A Monmouth poll taken shortly before the 2012 election showed that 51 percent of Republicans believed voter fraud was a “major problem.” A Marquette Law School poll in 2014 found that 54 percent of Republicans believed at least one kind of fraud affected thousands of votes in each election. A whopping 41 percent of independents agreed.

Having convinced a large segment of the population that voter fraud is an actual issue (again, let us be clear: it is not) Republicans now on the warpath to proclaim November’s contest legitimate need to come clean: which is it?

Is voter fraud the insidious and persistent threat they have claimed while hawking politically-motivated Voter ID laws? Or is everything hunky-dory, as they claim now, while fighting to keep disenchanted GOP voters motivated enough to visit the polls on Nov. 8?