Hi Rbit,
Those are good cases, thank!
I was aware of Al Gore, although at the end he shut up and went along (and got a billion dollar consolation prize, I'd say, in retrospect).
And, yes, Clinton protested Trump -- but I thought I counted her in my timeline (maybe I wasn't clear).
But until Trump in 2016, can you think of any historically recent cases where, at the end, the "loser" didn't go away relatively quietly?
Maybe I should restrict this to Presidential politics, since there are so many Congressional and other cases I don't know much about. BTW, I'm sure there has always been cheating, doubtless on both sides. But this seems, to me, to be the new normal. And the only way I can imagine things settling down again is paper ballots with iron-clad audit trails PLUS massive penalties + incentives for turning in cheaters. Then I think we might -- finally -- put this stupidity to bed.
And it IS stupid, because it wouldn't be THAT hard to make the elections really, really, really hard to cheat. This has been going on for hundreds of years...obviously because it pays (although maybe it was too hard to audit before modern tech? Do you know anything about how the French supposedly manage?)
--
PS I just did a quick search on French election integrity and maybe France's system is over-rated after all: http://www.gmfus.org/news/french-voters-should-consider-election-integrity-issues-they-vote-2022
Still, it seems like a paper ballot is a necessary starting point. Allowing citizens to audit their votes afterwards also seems necessary. There will always be mis-vote mistakes, no doubt...but the concern is not random errors but systematic errors where some computer software is the ultimate arbiter, and the computer software cannot be easily audited.
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