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2016 is a starting point, but it is only a weak indicator of inability or unwillingness. I indict the administration of elections at all levels, so an adequate steelman incorporating the 2016 general election only pushes the question back. Were they unable to inject large numbers of fraudulent ballots? Or were they unprepared and failed to inject enough?
A common oversight on this subject is the thought that stealing national elections requires national coordination. It is in the interest of the California Democratic Party to win California elections, if they are fabricating large numbers of ballots in the general, they can achieve the immediate goal of maintaining local power while achieving the incidental goal of the state's electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate for president. Same for Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia. It's the simulacra, the copy without an original. Many small groups who benefit from stealing local elections, who with no explicit cooperation steal a national election.
It sounds like you're assuming that democracy is and has always been a sham. (Or at least, has been a sham since some undeterminable point in the non-recent past.) But if democracy was merely a facade over authoritarianism, then we should expect there to be little difference in how "democratic" and "nondemocratic" states behave-- and little difference in their economic and military outcomes. But a cursory examination of history demonstrates exactly the opposite. If you compare european countries, the wealthy and prosperous ones are correspondingly less authoritarian, and while the authoritarian states pretend at democracy, they're transparently worse at in in various ways. If at some point the US stopped being democratic, we should expect some sort of regression towards an authoritarian mean-- except the US economy is one of the best-performing advanced economies worldwide.
There's still a lot of space for anti-democratic intervention; when it comes to elections "stolen" isn't a checkbox, it's a gradient. But self-evidently, whatever efforts the democrats have been making are on a lower order-of-magnitude scale of effect than the structural anti-democratic interventions of the electoral college and the fixed size of the house of representatives.
Not exactly. The point of forming political parties is to acquire power and resources-- not for the party, but for the individual members of the party. In a competitive environment, yes, it's in the interests of the members to work together to defeat common enemies. But as a group eliminates its competitors, intra-group conflict rises in intensity... and many of those specific factions and people involved see that, toward the tail end, if the group finishes eliminating its competitors-- then suddenly they have no more bargaining power within the group. And all of this happens fractally.
So-- a member of the californian democratic party has incentives to force state elections to be as fair as possible, even at the expense of the CDP, because relative to their own state their greatest enemies are members of their own party.But they want national elections to be tilted as far towards the national democratic party as possible because "california" is one of the biggest factions in the democratic party, and can be confident that they can re-task federal resources toward themselves if only they can eliminate the republican party as a real competitor.
But a member of the Pennsylvania democratic party has exactly the opposite incentives-- they're in a fight for their life locally, but the national status quo (of getting money funneled toward them from the national organization that they can in term hand out through patronage networks to advertisers and campaign staff) heavily benefits them. If the national election was less fair, suddenly they would get a much smaller share of the democratic party's overall bucket of goodies.
And yes, presumably you have people who just want to win their city council seat at any cost... but they in turn rely on staff with unpredictable allegiances. Is that poll worker here because they feel a deep allegiance to the democratic party or to democratic ideals? Do my supporters vote for me because they genuinely like me or because they think I'm the least-worst option? Is any specific person in my hierarchy going to accept orders to fake ballots or are they going to rat me out to the media for a paycheck and (if they're lucky) a book deal?
I won't claim that no malfeasance goes on. But stealing an election and winning an election require a very similar set of skills and resources. Positioning yourself to do the former puts you most of the way toward doing the latter. And considering the existence of explicitly adversarial factions with difficult-to-gauge power and unity, it becomes very risky indeed to try and steal elections in any blatant way. That's why Obama gave up his position to trump in 2016 and why trump gave up his position to biden when he lost in 2020.
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