Humm, seems like someone has forgotten about the debunked conspiracy theories that leading Democrats floated, e.g., the gigantic Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the claim that Russians helped Trump steal the 2016 election, the claim that Republicans stole the 2018 Georgia election for governor, and the claim that Republicans stole the 2004 election from John Kerry by manipulating voting machines.
And let's not forget the more recent crazy conspiracy claims floated by Democrats, such as the claim that Trump orchestrated the January 6, 2021 riot, that there would be no more elections if Trump won in 2024, that Republicans are trying to keep women from voting, etc., etc.
The one that stands out to me most is the 2004 election. For those who don't remember, it came down to Ohio just as the 2000 election came down to Florida, although it wasn't nearly as close. The claim was made that the voting machines had been rigged to steal votes for Bush. At the time, I was a poll worker and I knew how ludicrous that was. By law, each polling place is required to have two Democrats and two Republicans working. If there aren't two workers from each party available, an independent can be plugged in to work that slot. In our rural precinct, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by a 9 to 2 margin, so I was allowed to take one of the Democrat positions at our polling place. I learned a lot about how the process worked.
For starters, every county has its own method of voting, so a statewide manipulation of the vote is impossible. Our county used push button electronic machines. At the time, Columbus where I lived and worked for over 30 years still used the old mechanical voting machines, some of which were literally over 100 years old. Other counties used paper ballots and others used punch cards. Every county board was required to consist of two Democrats and two Republicans and jointly they would work together to ensure the integrity of the process. To claim the voting process was rigged to favor Bush was to accuse the Democrat county board members of being asleep at the switch. For example, the push button voting machines our county used were nothing more than generic counters with a slot assigned to each candidate or ballot issue. By Ohio law, the position each candidate appears on the ballot or machine has to be rotated so each candidate appears an equal number of times in each position. If there were five candidates for President, both the major and minor party candidates had to be placed an even number times in each of the five slots. A template was placed over each machine to indicate to the voter which candidate each slot was assigned to. The bi-partisan county boards worked together to set up and test the machines to ensure they were accurately recording the votes. It would require collusion among the board members to rig any voting machine to fraudulently record votes to favor one candidate or another. That is why i scoffed at allegations the election in Ohio was stolen for Bush. He won the state by about 120,000 votes. It is not remotely possible that the Republicans could have stolen that many votes for Bush.
Likewise, I am equally skeptical of Republicans who claim the Diebold voting machines were rigged to steal that state for Biden. Diebold is the same company that made the voting machines we used in Ohio. They were probably different models of machines than we had in 2004, but I assume Georgia had the same sort of safeguards we had in Ohio to ensure election integrity.
It is hardly a new phenomenon for the losing side in a close election to claim the other side cheated and stole the election. There are still Republicans to this day who think Dick Daley stole the 1960 election for JFK. While stories about vote stealing in Cook County, IL are well known, it is also true the Republicans in Lake County which comprises the northern Chicago suburbs engaged in the same sort of practices. Because Cook County was so much larger than Lake County, Democrats were just able to cheat on a larger scale than the Republicans. The truth is that even if Nixon had carried Illinois, he would have still lost the electoral college. The election hinged on three large states that were not declared until the wee hours of the following morning, Illinois, Texas, and Missouri. Nixon had to win all three to win the election. He didn't win any of them.
