Voting in the US was already a fragile thing with very little to trust about, purely due to the use of voting machines. Now it's a fully broken system, where no rules are holding up anymore.
The 2026 midterms _will_ be stolen.
Now, if you want to trust that the private militia with a budget higher than every single army in the world is definitely not going to intimidate voters and that the machines being "re-certified" are going to have accurate results, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
--- Is that really your own-developed opinion, based on concrete available data and reasonable examples, having passed through your own mind and examined by yourself? Or just entertaining oneself by spouting vehement political rhetoric for gratification? (i.e. opinion entertainment. as FN is rightly called)
But yeah sure, they're very afraid about FOIA requests :)
There is surely nothing at all different about our government as it was in 2024 vs today. We don't have a president that openly told his supporters that they won't have to vote in the next election because "we'll have it fixed so good." We don't have a president helping states more effectively gerrymander their districts, we don't have an administration passing new regulations making it harder to register to vote, restrictions on mail in ballots, and new rules for voting machines designed to decease polling location throughout which affects population centers the most.
Democracy in the US isn't well protected against "find a thing that splits across parties mostly evenly and then make it harder for your opponents." The AlphaPheonix gerrymandering software can give you any election result you want. You don't have to ever stuff a ballot box to get whatever result you want.
2020 was a free and fair election.
> the paper ballots retain a direct record of voter intent.
This is true, although it's expensive to recount the paper ballots and in practice people don't often do it. They routinely do a sort of checksum or sanity check by sampling small numbers of ballots. But a full-on paper ballot recount is rare.
Bush v Gore is a famous example of a recount that was halted before it finished.
A better example of close elections and recount procedures is the literal tie that happened in a Virginia state legislature race in 2017. The attorneys were able to litigate the validity and intent of individual ballots in that race because they had the physical ballots, as well as the machine scans and logs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia%27s_94th_House_of_Del...