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Notes -
I agree with you broadly but you are overstating your case. It is perfectly consistent to state that factions have a limited ability to steal elections.
One dynamic you see in historical studies of stolen elections is that there are typically both honest and stolen locales, and the stolen locales vary in their willingness to lie.
In the famous and well studied cases of LBJ in Texas, rotten boroughs varied. From precincts where voters were handed $5 and a shot of tequila before voting in person, to places where voters were marched in by shotgun wielding ranch foremen and instructed who to vote for, to precincts where the ranch owners dropped off the identical filled ballots of all their employees, to precincts where no one seemed to show up to vote but all the registered voters were recorded as voting, to precincts where votes were filled out in alphabetical order for people who didn't live there or had died years ago.
In LBJ's first Senate campaign, he made use of all these methods as did his opponent, but LBJ announced his results first, and his opponent was able to steal enough extra votes to win. In his second, LBJ did not make that mistake again, and stole more aggressively and at the last minute, but still one by a tiny margin after tapping all his resources.
It's perfectly possible to say that faction can rig an election between a set margin, but not outside it.
The problem is that this isn't claimed by most election truthers, and certainly not consistently.
For sure, and I actually say as much in my reply to WalterOdim here.
It’s very likely (and of course historically proven) that low-level functionaries involved in the political process in various counties across the US engage in forms of corruption up to and including Actual Rigging (meaning actually manipulating vote totals). And it is true that, in an incredibly close election, this could serve (and has served) to elect one candidate over the other. I’m very sceptical that the ‘deep state’ or indeed any DC bureaucrat is involved in that kind of action, I think it’s ground-up and low level, and I think supporters of both parties engage in it. But it happens, and I think it’s important to acknowledge it.
But this isn’t the typical claim. The narrative from hardcore Trumpist rigging claimants isn’t typically that Trump almost legitimately lost but that he actually won a tiny number of additional ballots (or local Democrats added extra Biden votes) on a tiny scale in one Georgia county. It’s that a huge conspiracy prevented their candidate, who was supposedly vastly more popular, from winning nationwide by a huge margin. The question ‘do you concede that, even if you’re correct about those ballots, Trump could very easily (and almost did) fully legitimately lose the 2020 election, and if he did actually win, he won by a tiny amount?’ is the telling one here. As is (and this is even more important) ‘did something beyond the low-level hum of corruption that has been a feature of American democracy since 1776 occur specifically to prevent Trump from being re-elected?’.
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