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Notes -
It depends on the scale. For a claim of large-magnitude manipulation (skewing the popular vote by 5% or more), I'd take a plausible scenario how it could be done, corroborated by a significant number of eyewitness accounts from people who do not directly stand to benefit from the claim being proven true (in particular, disqualifying dedicated members of the party alleging manipulation to its disadvantage). Of course, this does leave the possibility that your party should have 55% of the vote but the other 45% have formed a unified block that will falsify the result while agreeing to keep it secret, but this in itself (almost complete absence of people who are not in the affected party, involved with the electoral process and would testify to manipulation they observed) seems like a very surprising scenario. Sure you could in turn concoct a conspiratorial scenario in which principled paper pushers do not exist and they all merely pretend in public that they would execute their role according to its description, and so on, but then increasingly your gap scenario will just look like an alternative model of reality on the algorithmic complexity level of a religion.
For a claim of smaller-scale manipulation (like a 0.5% skew that flips the result), evidence gets harder to come by (and to begin with, how would you even prove that any 0.5% manipulation against you that you presented evidence for was not outweighed by 1% manipulation for you that you didn't present evidence for?), but I'm also finding it harder to consider such cases a "stolen election". Elections shouldn't be sports contests, even if some people feel about them that way; for a country to be governed by the whims of 49.5% instead of the whims of 50.5% does not feel like a terrific delta-injustice. To begin with, this puts us in the range where an election could be "stolen" by adverse weather in a few large metro areas. Either way, this is not the order of magnitude that I expect the parent poster to be wrong by - apparently in 2016 both candidates received around 60 million votes, so he probably will wind up having to assert manipulation on the order of 20+%, based on nothing but the feeling that everyone he knows is extremely outraged about the conviction and so an approximate fifty-fifty can't possibly be representative.
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