Subject: Re: The Army of Election Officials ...
The reporter keeps knocking down his election conspiracy theories with facts, but he falls back on...he just knows in his gut that Trump won. And he has only the most absurd nonsense to support his 'gut'.

Again, it's the damage caused by Trump and his allies breaking the trust in the system.

Voters know that the system is fair because the candidates and the campaigns get to watch everything that happens. The way you keep Democrats from cheating is by letting the GOP see every part of the ballot-counting process; the same is true of Republicans. The system relies on the campaigns watching everything, observing for themselves that no cheating took place in the counting, and then accepting that no cheating took place.

If the campaign goes out and tells everyone that the other side cheated during the counting, though, then that eradicates that entire framework. The framework is set up so that each campaign's partisans get to watch the counting, and then they report back to the party and candidate that they saw the counting done fairly - and then the party and candidates communicate to their supporters that the counting was done fairly.

If the candidate falsely claims that the counting was done unfairly, that framework is destroyed. If Trump falsely claims he won, even though he didn't, his supporters are going to believe him. They're going to trust him rather than his political opponents. Since the system relies on the candidates being honest in communicating that the count was conducted fairly, there's no way to repair the damage if they're dishonest.