Why would you be driven to make baseless claims about election fraud? it seems so norm-eroding, so dangerous a precedent to set - knocking out the epistemic ladder up which we climb to democracy, leaving a future in which legitimacy can't exist.
Presumably (1) you would only do so if you felt that the threat posed by losing the election was as large as the threat of the collapse of legitimate government anyway (i.e. if you were really desperate) but also ...
...(2)Do accusations of electoral fraud betray a lack of faith in the rationality of voters: "Reasonable people couldn't vote for the opposition, so those votes must be fraudulent"? In this way calls of electoral fraud are the right's Cambridge Analytica
Just as some couldn't believe 2016 results and so blamed digital advertising (rather than trying to understand the actual reasons people voted like they did), maybe blaming electoral fraud is another symptom of the same thing, a failure to engage with voters' choices
Both attitudes draw succour from a belief in human irrationality, both take legitimate concerns about democracy and use them as springboard to actually undermine it
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