I'm sure if you pumped a bunch of truth serum into a lot of folks here they'd swear up and down that we should have had President Al Gore in 2001.

Sure, but they don't believe that Republicans were secretly stealing filled out ballots from the rooms in which the counting took place. They may have reasonable disagreements about some of the decisions and choices that were openly and publicly made - which counties to recount, how the recount was conducted. But not that Republicans were sneaking in suitcases of unsecured ballots to fraudulently inflate Bush's vote count.

I will happily grant that point, yes. The democrats have earned the mistrust, disrespect and outright scorn that millions of Republicans have for them. And why not? You can only piss on someone and tell them it's raining so many times before they walk away or do something else.

And there's lots of Democrats that feel the same way about Republicans - that they're nothing but lying liars who lie, who are constantly trying to convince people of false things. Democrats also believe that Republicans are doing lots of unfair things in setting the rules for elections, the way they implement those rules, the behavior they engage in during campaigns, etc.

But you know what high-ranking Democrats don't do? They don't try to claim that the process for counting duly cast ballots is being fraudulently cheated. Because they know that's not true. That any such perfidy would be caught by their own monitors in the room. That any cheating that was big enough to matter would be caught, and any cheating small enough not to get caught wouldn't matter. And they say so, in their concession speeches and in telling their supporters to move on once the election is done.

That's why your assertions that the right wing won't riot if the election is fair are simply untrue. It won't matter whether the election is or is not fair. The right wing will believe that it's not fair, because the current Republican upper level (Trump and his allies) has been falsely telling them that the actual counting of ballots is rigged. Which is both false and unique to this specific instantiation of the GOP.