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This isn't quite what you're asking for, but I believe there was some recent news that the immigrant communities in Michigan (in, for example, Hamtramck) have been shown to have substantial amounts of vote-buying going on, wherein empty absentee ballots are collected. Claims of this go back well before voter fraud was made a partisan issue with the 2020 election, in, for example, this story. Sure, I get that those are biased sources, but are they wrong? (Of course, it is unsurprising that a D-leaning political machine would be more likely to be investigated by R-leaning people.)
I don't know that that was enough to sway the election, but if he was aware that stuff like this was going on, suddenly his actions seem a bit less crazy.
You ask how a conspiracy would be kept under wraps. Well, in this case, first, it wasn't as if it wasn't talked about beforehand, as I pointed to. But second, the fact that it's an immigrant community would substantially help, as they'd be more isolated, and not as likely to speak English. I'm also not seeing what gains from defecting you are pointing to.
Sure, there are some dirty tactics used with absentee ballots. I'm actually all for election security reform. I have no problem with voter ID requirements.
My problem is that the more grandiose claims of election interference are a lot harder to believe. Claims that the election was stolen by fake ballots being added to the count. Claims that dead people were voting in sufficient numbers to swing the election. I've never seen anything that supports these claims with sufficient evidence to be convincing.
As for the "gains", well, if you had evidence of a conspiracy to overturn a US Presidential election, that evidence could be used to get you almost anything you could want. Huge amounts of money, either from the right or from foreign powers. National fame. Or maybe just assuaging your own guilt. If you had thousands of people involved in something like this, you don't think a single one of them would defect?
I think I agree on both points, at least for something at scale large enough to have overturned the 2020 election.
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You don't need thousands of people, and even if you did all that's necessary for none of them to speak out is for them all to think that owning the White House is more important than any of those other things. If you have that you don't even need them to explicitly collaborate, a distributed prospiracy would accomplish the goal perfectly well.
If you controlled the media, you could maybe start a campaign to convince your audience that the opposing candidate is a Threat to Democracy and his supporters are very likely to infect you with a Deadly Pandemic or something?
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