2016 or 2020?

Both I presume.

And all future ones with such rigid controls in place

2000, my boy Al Gore was robbed by that butterfly ballot UX

No, it was Roger Stone and SCotus that overturned the vote in Florida.

No it was karl rove using internet connected hacked election machines.

You're thinking of the Alabama and Ohio Senate races.

To my way of thinking, when a vote comes down to a margin that narrow, something else is seriously wrong. Frankly, democracy is probably not the right model when that kind of polarization is present.

There's a term that applied in other fields to large-scale systems that are that incredibly sensitive to their input parameters: chaos.

Is this a serious question? I'm not from the US, and though I follow your politics I of course have a limited perspective - but is it really a common perspective to draw an equivalence between the claims regarding election integrity for 2016 and 2020?

Speaking from my own American perspective, with both progressive and conservative friends, the answer to your question about whether it is a common perspective, is "yes". For the last several elections, whichever side loses thinks the election was stolen.

Weird. The only Democrats or liberals I've heard complain that an election was stolen were talking about the Bush vs Gore, where the Supreme Court decided that it could make the call.

Maybe you're talking about Gerrymandering, which is a very real method of undermining democracy, but I've never heard anyone refer to it as election theft.

Mostly the 2016 talk revolved around the idea that the electoral college was illegitimate, and Hillary Clinton's majority of the popular vote should have been what determined the presidency.

Confidence in the previous election generally falls along partisan lines, where those who supported the loser are more skeptical than those who supported the winner. You're probably familiar with Republican skepticism about 2020, so I'll point you to the numbers on Democrat skepticism about 2016.

In 2018, 66% of Democrats [0] believed it was "definitely true or somewhat true" that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president." Moreover, in January 2017, during the certification of the 2016 election, Democrat legislators made objections to votes from more states than did Republicans in January 2020. [1]

[0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-democrats-object-mor...

But the thing is, it's not an equivalence, right? We know for a fact that Russia tampered in the 2016 US election. The republican candidate literally asked for their help on live TV, his campaign met with them, several people close to him during his presidency were indicted for contact with Russia. In comparison, the claims regarding election integrity for 2020 are circumstancial and baseless (in the sense that if I were the Republicans and there indeed was no cheating, but I wanted to convince the public, I wouldn't do anything differently). How can anyone look at this seriously and see anything comparable?

There's a big difference between information warfare and tampering with vote tallies, which is what the poll asked, and which was the basis on which Democrats objected to their certification.

Additionally, I'm not making any argument about the validity of claims on either side - just pointing out that the skepticism falls along partisan lines.

HRC conceded the next day. Trump incited a riot. But yeah, totes the same, BSAB.

Not the same.

But I remember both Democrats and Republicans bleating on about stolen elections for years after 2016 and 2020.

Maybe it's a good thing I stopped watching late-night comedy!

This false equivalence of things is another Russian propaganda method. The US bombed Iraq? Therefore Russia has a right to genocide peoples and annex territories. Someone said “not my president” in 2017? Therefore Republicans are entitled to coercing officials to throw out votes they don’t like.