The whole reason people think it's fraud is because the media led people to think that Hillary couldn't possibly lose. When she lost, people started looking for an explanation.
Not to mention that this entire election cycle was one where bad actors from all directions took advantage of the poor discernment of the American electorate to the point where truth, innuendo, dubious claims and outright lies were given equal weight in the decision making process of many. Informational chaos has now been proven to be a winning strategy (and not just because Trump won) so why wouldn't that carry on post-election?
While I am no fan of the man, and have no doubt that he would fiercely have contested a loss, I don't think that it is quite as you have described it. What I remember is that he said that he would "keep you in suspense", and that he would accept the election results "if he was satisfied", never explicitly that he would only accept a victory for himself.
I think the "I'll look at it on the day" comments came a bit later.
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/20/politics/donald-trump-i-wi...
Because even then he said, that he is not going to say that he wil accept a loss, no matter what happened.
Because the results of a single state can swing the total so wildly out of proportion with the state's population, doing recounts against the paper trail (which otherwise would never get looked at) seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Really, the problem is capping the number of representatives at around 450. We should have something like 1000-3000 members of the house, which if distributed by population would fix most people's problems with the electoral college.
Basically, Congress got selfish and broke the balance of power for the country to entrench their own, and now the states that don't do much have too much say, and basically slow the country down.
I'm not sure that this synonymy is justified.
The Electoral College is exactly based on a state's congressional representation. California has more people, thus more electoral votes. Each electoral vote represents roughly 700,000 people within a state.
While state lines are arbitrary, states are not: they represent a sovereign entity within the United States much like Belgium is a sovereign state within the EU despite Belgium having arbitrary borders. To think otherwise is to fail to understand what the United States is: a federal system with divisions of power allocated by the Constitution. The interests of the people of Louisiana are vastly different than those of New York -- the system represents that reality.
The more interesting question is if we would have this discussion if Hillary had won? Popular vote does not determine the presidency -- that has been true since the beginning; it isn't like anyone was robbed.
If Trump had lost and Breitbart had conducted some statistical analysis to prove that the vote was rigged, it wouldn't even make it on Hacker News. Every election one side or another tries to justify their losses but rarely does such a justification ascend to high art as it is apparently doing here. Ultimately the bottom line is that the media state-by-state predictions were wrong and now there is hand-wringing to rationalize it. National polls are meaningless yet we continue to subscribe to their irrelevance.
That's not how any federal system works. They are more like unions of states than one big government and in a union the less powerful partners deserve some protections.
The plain fact of the matter is that the representative system was implemented for two reasons 1) necessity in a pre-industrial society 2) to actually limit the power of the people.
The fact that #2 was intended to make us safer (avoid a tyranny of the masses, etc) doesn't change the fact that our government is intended not to listen to our opinions.