Sketchy stuff doesn't happen.

You can say this with 100% certainty? Bold statement.

What does happen is ordinary, non-sketchy stuff that people either mistakenly or deliberately say is sketchy. Not because they are looking at it with a "jaundiced" eye, but because they are seeing what they want to see - or have already decided they will see.

Uh, huh.
So it's all a matter of perception, and Republicans are just lied to all the time?

If people weren't being told - falsely - over and over again that the other side was always cheating (again, even though none of the observers who had the opportunity to watch them would ever say they were cheating), then people wouldn't be falsely believing that all these things were malfeasance or perfidy, rather than the inevitable result of such a sprawling process.

Hmmm. Perhaps if the democrats - from their Presidential candidates on down - didn't constantly let the mask slip and weren't doing things...like, say:

-Illegally sourcing bogus intelligence reports from foreign agents
-Collude with Big Tech to throttle/censor/suppress information harmful to the democrat party
-(plus a bunch of stuff I typed, then deleted, for brevity)

I'm sorry to have to say this, but I see zero reason to assume any democrat politician -or- left-leaning media outfit operates with a shred of integrity. That's done with; when it comes to truth-telling I automatically assume every democrat I'm listening to is either wrong, lying, obfuscating, taking things out of context or leading with a dishonest premise.

So to your point I extend that all the way down the stack. Rotten apples spoil the entire barrel, after all. It's not just the ones on top that are bad.