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I can think of 2 counterarguments about being unable to at least do so secretly:
The U.S. has an oppositional system. Corrupt states generally have one party so entrenched that the opposing party can't really do anything about it. Whereas if Republicans have strong evidence of Democratic cheating, they should likely have the means to either uncover it, or to cheat right back.
An internal defector would also be likely. The election system involves so many people that it would be difficult to not encounter someone with moral objections or simply wants the fame and cash that would likely result in running to Fox News. I know you precluded this with your link, but your link only establishes it as theoretically possible rather than likely. Becoming a poll worker doesn't require the same level of background checks as secret clearance, and seems much harder to ensure a cohesive conspiracy.
I wouldn't expect Republicans of a given swing state to be able to thoroughly investigate the electoral procedures of their blue island cities. More, up until 2020 there was no serious consideration on the right of leftist electoral fraud. They weren't looking for it, weren't thinking about it, now that they are, we might expect investigations. Especially with the next Trump administration.
A low level government bureaucrat probably belongs to the group of people least likely to defect, save for those in criminal groups where defectors are killed. It's their job, for many it's the best they can get, why would they defect? Moral concern begs the question.
Why not? State power trumps local power, and a swing state likely has enough Republican power to have a decent shot at investigating it. I also don't buy that the right is only just now thinking about election fraud. This has been a talking point for decades, even if it ramped up in 2020.
It's a low level job, and low level jobs typically cycle a lot of people in and out. Hell, isn't it a common saying that young people have no respect for their jobs and barely even show up? Plus for many it's a temp job.
As for why they would defect, let me put it this way. Stormy Daniels got $130,000 for the rights to her story about sleeping with Trump. Let's say I have solid proof of voter fraud. If I took said evidence to Fox News, how much do you think I could get them to pay for it?
With regards to moral concern, it's a numbers game. According to a quick search there were 774,000 poll workers in 2020. And some states like Ohio and New York explicitly require a mix of party affiliation. The point is that a conspiracy requires pretty much everyone at a given location to be in on it.
Judicial power trumps state power, and left-aligned judges have been prolific at stopping Republican attempts at legislating electoral security; why would they be any more cooperative in investigations obstructed by hyperblue municipal bureaucracies? Beyond that, while fraud has been something generally talked about, it was not a matter du jour of the 2016 electoral cycle or the 2020 electoral cycle, its prominence today is novel to post-9/11 American political discourse.
Money is an incentive for defection, but there must be an interested purchasing party and goods to deliver. Daniels is a porn star who had evidence of having had sex with the President, of course she was going to be handsomely compensated for the story. A poll worker would have no story merely saying "This many ballots were fraudulently filed," even an interested party would not likely pay them, because that testimony is worth nothing.
The procedure for striking ballots as fraudulent is not a poll worker coming forward and saying "I fraudulently filled 10,000 ballots." The procedure is the poll worker comes forward and says "I applied a secret watermark to these 10,000 ballots; forensic expert team A will prove all 10,000 watermarks are identical and were indeed produced by the same process and human hand rather than being an artifact of printing or processing; forensic expert team B will prove I am the individual who produced that watermark all 10,000 times."
Goes to court. Forensic teams successfully tie poll worker to a ballot. Yes, a ballot, 1 ballot.
9,999 hearings to go, because every single ballot must be individually proved as fraudulent, else a legal ballot be illegally struck. See the scope of the problem?
You also assume this as a complex process requiring many people be aware. We don't know how many people are required to flip elections because the process is closed to audit. It could take dozens, it could take hundreds, it could take a handful of people placed at the exact link in the chain where boxes of fake ballots can be introduced and laundered with boxes of legal ballots. We don't know, and this by the way is and has been my entire point throughout my time talking about fraud on this site. When I say "We have no way of knowing" I am describing the act of criminal fraud. It is tax fraud for a corporation to have numbers closed to audit and it is electoral fraud for a government to have ballot numbers closed to audit.
Republicans would still likely take the matter to court if they believed fraud existed. Also, Bush v Gore was famously decided in Bush's favor. Kerry supported a lawsuit by Green and Libertarian candidates. There was an interesting result in that one in that the random recount was found to be rigged but beyond that didn't seem to go anywhere.
I would note a correlation between its recent prominence and a candidate who makes a lot of wild claims.
I covered the interested party aspect already - Fox News. Or how abut the Heritage Foundation? Or Donald Trump himself? Hell, even without any evidence, claim to be a poll worker who found fraud and Trump will organize a parade for you.
I won't claim to be a legal expert, but this doesn't seem right. And even if it were, again the news itself would be something Trump would never ignore.
Yes, I do think it would lean on the complex side. Even a precision strike requires getting said people into that exact position. I don't think election fraud is 100% impossible, but I think this is a Russell's Teapot situation. I don't think that equal skepticism is being applied to claims of fraud being true as is applied to claims supposedly disproving said claims.
I can't say I strongly oppose more auditing, outside of that I suspect the only result of it would be that the people predisposed to believe in election fraud will latch on some innocuous detail and/or create a new appeal to missing information. I don't agree that Democrats have as much of a stranglehold on the gears of politics that their opponents can't and/or won't stop them. If they did Trump would be kept nowhere near power.
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While president, Trump had a 'voter fraud' commission. Republicans were thinking about and looking for electoral fraud, they just didn't find any significant amount.
You mean this one?
Make the argument he faced near-total bipartisan opposition, sure. Don't make the implicatively false tie with the 2020 General and the patently false "didn't find any."
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