The last-but-one presidential election was affected by various states illegally throwing large numbers of legal voters off their voter rolls, but it’s impossibl

The last-but-one presidential election was affected by various states illegally throwing large numbers of legal voters off their voter rolls, but it’s impossible to say whether it would have made enough difference to alter the outcome, and there’s no convincing evidence votes were directly changed. (It would be a good thing to have a verifiable paper trail for every election; in some parts of the USA it is impossible to effectively investigate any alleged shenanigans.) The bigger problem in that election was Russian-intelligence-stolen (and possibly tampered with) documents being released to the press in the lead up to the election in coordination with the Trump campaign (with the FBI keeping its investigation of that secret), and then the FBI director making an unprecedented and (we found out only afterward) unsupportable statement attacking Clinton immediately before the election, after being pressured into it by a handful rogue FBI agents who were friends of Trump’s campaign threatening insubordination. And perhaps the biggest problem of all, an entirely too credulous mainstream media who didn’t put those developments in context, leaving voters to draw mistaken inferences, and giving oodles of free airtime to Trump’s rallies without making any effort to dispute outright lying in real time.