Joe Kennedy almost certainly stole the 1960 election for his son. Nixon knew this but decided it wasn't worth the national grief to fight it.

How so? The vote differential from FL was clearly within the margin of error of the counting methods, but that only suggests the possibility of a counting error, not a steal.

Gore lost because of the poor design of the Florida butterfly ballot. The official 537 vote margin is a political expedience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

> About 19,000 ballots were spoiled because of overvotes (two votes in the same race), compared to 3000 in 1996.[18]:215–221 According to a 2001 study in the American Political Science Review, the voting errors caused by the butterfly ballot cost Gore the election: "Had PBC used a ballot format in the presidential race that did not lead to systematic biased voting errors, our findings suggest that, other things equal, Al Gore would have won a majority of the officially certified votes in Florida."

And yet the protests then were level-headed, largely peaceful, and fully justifiable.

Are you suggesting that the design was made with the intention to take votes from Gore? Because that would be necessary to call it a "stolen" election. I acknowledge the possibility that the outcome was in error.

I'm not saying it was explicitly intentional but it isn't believable nobody on the election commission was aware of the alignment issues from previous elections. It is either straight up incompetence or willful neglect. Either way, the will of the people wasn't acted upon.

Doesn't need to be intentional, the fact that when the mistake was shown after the fact, the best they could do is invalidate tens of thousands of votes, which very likely were for one candidate, shows how the win was stolen from him.

This argument only works if you ignore the voters who were improperly purged from the voter rolls for having the same or similar names as convicted felons.

In addition, there was a big movement that claimed 2004 election was stolen from Kerry. Several books were published on it in fact. See this article from Politico, which covered it again in light of the Trump claims. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/19/2004-kerry...

I don't think this election was stolen, but in 2004, I did think there were oddities which were swept under the rug.