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In order to have a functioning democracy, you need to be able to convince the losing party that they lost a fair game. Therefore, any problems or irregularities with the elections delegitimize the elections to some extent. It doesn't even matter all that much if it's deliberate tampering or honest mistakes, or if nothing at all happened and it just kind of looks like something might've. The loser has no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt. Really nothing should even look like it's going wrong.
You need more than that to have a functioning democracy. In order to avoid incentivising defection from democracy, you also need to have fair post-game reward distribution. It's not enough for the vote itself to be fair. The actual exercise of power after the vote must be fair. If one side wins elections and then gets to enact policy, while the other side wins elections but then doesn't get to change policy, then this is hardly any better than the election being rigged in the first place. But this also has to balance against not harming the losers too much. There's no reason for the one sheep to accept two wolves voting to eat it, and it would be wrong to describe their subsequent attempt at self-defence as an attack on democracy.
Both parties in the US seem to hold both these grievances with existing elections, though they both responded to it in different ways. Republicans by claiming the voting process is flawed, and Democrats by claiming foreign interference made it flawed.
What exactly makes democrats think they got an unfair deal? Russia collusion was basically a fear reaction, not an escalation to feeling screwed by the democratic process.
The standard Dem "elections are rigged" rant is that all three federal elections (President, House and Senate) produce Republican control even if Democrats are slightly ahead in the popular vote. The electoral college is a fossil that makes no more sense than the continued presence of hereditary peers in the British House of Lords, and lots of Democrats (wrongly) feel the same way about the Senate. The Republican advantage in the House is the result of deliberate gerrymandering, including recursive gerrymandering where purple states elect Republican-dominated House delegations on maps gerrymandered by Republican-dominated state legislatures that are themselves elected on self-gerrymandered maps.
The gerrymander in Wisconsin is so severe that if it happened in a third world country then the State Department would call it a flawed democracy.
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I think the supreme court getting in the way of policies that democrats want to implement would serve as an example. Either way, I didn't say these had to be justified grievances.
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This is why I've found the Democratic response to Trump's/Republican claims of 2020 election fraud so frustrating. As someone who believes that there's no good reason to believe that any meaningful election fraud took place in 2020, if I were in charge of the Democratic party, I would have responded to such accusations by investigating with so much fervor that even the most die-hard Trumpist would think we should be scaling it back. If fraud were not found, then this would embarrass and discredit Trump and his ilk, and if it were found, then it will help us to run more valid elections in the future, as well as possibly correct errors in the 2020 election. This seems like a win-win. Mocking the fraud accusations seems like a pure power move - "I won, therefore I get my way instead of yours," instead of "I won, therefore my belief that the contest was fair has no credibility, and thus I'll defer to your judgment for the sake of keeping our democratic republic credibly such."
If dozens of Trump-appointed judges finding no fraud, why would some commission appointed by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer convince anybody?
The reason why more than half of Trump voters believe there was fraud is because Trump to this very day continues to say so.
Note than in the 2022 midterms, many candidates in a lot of different races all claimed there might be fraud in the lead-up, but all of them, including very MAGA types like Mastriano in Pennsylvania all conceded and gave very typical except Kari Lake in Arizona, who is now losing a Senate race by 5 to 10 points.
There were no big changes in the laws in most of these states between 2020 & 2022, but nowhere the same amount of people think that for example, there was fraud in Catherine Cortez Mastro's 0.8% win in Nevada, despite at the time, Nevada being a completely Democratic-controlled state.
Who knows why? I'm more interested in the "if" than the "why," and there's only one way to answer that question. I'd love to have found out by first having Pelosi and Schumer or anyone else at the top of the party first establishing themselves as so rabidly pro-finding-of-fraud that even Trumpists want to dial it down a bit and then establishing some commission (or more effectively, having someone vetted by Trump himself establish the commission).
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I mean because there would be a complete investigation for one thing. What made the conspiracy theory take off more than it ever would have is the fact that nobody officially ever looked at the evidence. The Message was always “nothing to see here, and if you’re asking questions about it, you’re falling for disinformation.” That message cannot inspire people to believe that the election was fair. There’s no discussion of the evidence, no day in court, no witnesses cross examined, nothing that would give the impression that there’s anyone official who cares about the claim.
There were plenty of days in court - there was just zero actual evidence to get past the first hoop despite being in front of in many cases, Republican or Trump-appointed judges.
There isn't zero actual evidence, there isnt evidence that doesn't have other possible explanations. Which is, unfortunately, how the system will always be by design. You can even catch a bunch of people on camera dropping load after load of ballots into boxes and they say, "well could be legit." You find statistical anomalies, well thats only circumstantial. You have people mishandling boxes in a polling place? Meh. You have proof the governor made illegal "emergency rules" again meh.
To catch fraud the fraudsters have to be incredibly stupid, like following a post truck and stealing mail in the middle of the day.
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First of all, if the Democrats investigated and found nothing, the Republicans would (not without reason) sneer that "The Democrats investigated the Democrats and found the Democrats did nothing wrong". Second.... perhaps they do have good reason to believe that meaningful fraud took place.
If a Republican investigated and found nothing, then the MAGA Republicans would say "An establishment RINO investigated the establishment Democrats and found the Democrats did nothing wrong...", because from the MAGA perspective any Republican who doesn't pretend to believe that the 2020 election was stolen is a RINO.
Donald Trump could personally say that the 2020 election was not stolen and his supporters would not believe him - we know this because he did and the MAGA alt-media machine kicked up enough of a fuss that he had to walk it back.
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Well, just because I'm a Democrat doesn't mean I can't appoint a Republican to run the investigation. Heck, even give Trump himself the right to hand-pick the one top investigator in charge. Ideally, the investigation should be bipartisan, but it's hard to be credibly so, just make it partisan against my favor.
And if top Democrats do have good reason to believe that meaningful fraud took place, then as a Democratic voter, I would want this to be revealed and publicized, so as to excise the Democratic party of fraudsters and their enablers, which would increase the credibility of the Democratic party's dedication to keeping our democratic republic democratic. Unlike a Democrat calling out a Republican, a Democrat calling out a Democrat for fraud (that helped Democrats) is a costly signal to the electorate that Democrats really do care about democracy. Let democracy be done, though the Democratic party fall.
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