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No, it's incoherent. There is literally no point in having audits or paper trails if there is not an objective measure of who wins an election. In our actual reality, the organizing principal we use is, " the guy with the most votes wins" (to first order). Even the steal crowd universally couches their arguments in terms of stolen votes, vote counts, counting processes etc. factually, the number of counts matters, because that is the agreed upon standard.
Someone can always in principle defect from the process, but that is not particularly interesting since anyone can always defect from any process. In that case, the losing party should be honest and say, "I don't like this outcome, so fuck you I won't respect it" rather than endlessly engaging in claims of irregularities in the administrivia.
This doesn't logically follow from what you wrote above. Granting we have a mutually agreed upon process (as you say), even if it has no contact with any objective truth or measure, if party A has a concern, they should be able to point to some irregularity in the paper trail. That is it's whole reason for existing, by your own argument. If they think the process itself is unfair, they can always point to a specific attribute of the process. If party A just sits back and says, you know what, this seems fishy, why don't you bring me another rock and maybe that will assuage concerns, there's no reason why that should shift the burden of proof at all.
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