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I do not understand how this is even a controversial statement. Look at Bush/Gore 2000 election, which was decided by margin of 537 votes out of 5.8 million for Bush in Florida and by 366 votes out of 572 thousand for Gore in New Mexico. I have utmost confidence that Bush won thanks to some type of cheating, which was enough to offset Gore's cheating. And it is not as if Bush was some unimpactful president. One can say that whole US history was changed thanks to electoral cheating.
The whole system incentivizes - and as the previous case shows - rewards cheating. It is no conspiracy theory to have priors in favor of cheating deciding the elections, especially if the margin was couple of thousand of votes in contested states.
Yeah, people who were not around or memoryholed the 2000 election as "Republican SCOTUS picks Bush as President" forget what the real takeaway was, which was that Miami-Dade county was a hive of scum and villainy that had been doing shady things for decades to tilt its results in the direction of Democrats. It took such and embarrassing display for the state government to get cajoled into fairly authoritarian measures to force them to actually run their elections competently and fairly.
It beggars belief that anyone would really think that places like Vegas, Philly, LA, Atlanta, etc don't have similar problems. To put it bluntly, if you don't have votes fully tallied within 12 hours of polls closing you are so grossly incompetent, or are intentionally manipulating vote totals, that none of the votes in your jurisdiction should be treated as legitimate.
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