When the next election rolled around, when Obama won, they didn't make a peep about the electronic voting machines, which were still in use, nor about the possibility of voting fraud. Neither did the Republicans. Nor did anyone mention these issues in the following election, when Obama won again. It was only Trump speaking up about it which brought the issue back in to the news. But the possibility of massive voting fraud has been there all along, and will continue to be there for the following elections, as long as electronic voting machines are still in use.

Now, why does the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties permit these machines to continue to be used? That's a very good question. The consipracy minded might speculate that they might have an agreement between them, and that US elections have become simply political theater, with the real decisions as to who gets to hold office being made through other means, and by people other than the voters.

The question is whether Trump supporters were better at cheating than Clinton supporters, or better at covering their tracks. Even if nobody suspected fraud, we should still be doing randomized checks for it, in a transparent, publicly-auditable way.

My hypothesis is that voting fraud is endemic, but that it only rarely influences the results of any election. I suspect that most of it is done by crackers for hire or by people already heavily invested in politics who happen to have the necessary skills.

It just seems like such a simple, boring, and yet insanely high-risk hack that no one would bother doing it just for the giggles of getting Ivanna Tinkle elected as county dogcatcher. Also, in order to pull off a significant advantage, you would need a conspiracy of multiple actors in several different counties, and the more participants you have, the less likely it is you will be able to keep it secret.

Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) could silently steal an election with a vote fraud conspiracy, but no actual, living person could--not until all the votes are cast on network-connected machines, anyway.

It doesn't have to be one person. It could be multiple teams of people.

They don't have to intervene all over the country, either. They could make a huge difference by affecting a relatively small number of votes in a handful of battleground states where the race is very close.

In the case of Bush v Gore, it would have been sufficient to make a difference in only one state.

For real people, the more people you add for operations, the more you have to add for security and cleanup. Beyond a certain point, you just can't keep everybody quiet without extreme measures, which are themselves likely to be noticed.

Secret conspiracies have to be small, otherwise someone eventually gets disgruntled or has an attack of conscience and spills the beans.

Even large, public conspiracies, like the classified documents protection system, eventually develop leaks, and it is already really expensive to operate before accounting for cleanup up after spies or whistleblowers.

So if we ever reach the point where five people or less could remotely rig the vote for every county in Florida, I have to not only assume that it is being done every election, but also that multiple groups may be stepping on each other's toes while doing it. Previously, the traditional ways of rigging the vote are right out in the open. You get people likely to vote against you stricken from the voter register. You enter fake ballots in the name of someone not likely to vote, such as the recently deceased. You sabotage polling places in urban areas such that voter throughput is reduced, and lines grow around the block. You get local cops out on the streets, giving out traffic citations to selected people that may be on their way to vote. I have even seen sudden construction activity on election day obstructing the sole entrance to a polling place.

Those are nasty, but at least people can seek redress for the misbehavior that they can see.