Donald Trump complains that nefarious forces are conspiring to rig the presidential election against him. "What I've seen is so bad," he said in the final presidential debate on Wednesday. There are "millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn't be registered to vote."
So, he said, he will tell us on election night whether he accepts the result. "I'll keep you in suspense."
Many doubtless agree with President Barack Obama that Mr. Trump should "stop whining and try to make his case to get votes."
But perhaps we're not giving the Republican candidate his due. Perhaps there is a vast, left-wing conspiracy to cook the electoral books – to make a fair-and-square Trump triumph on Nov. 8 look, instead, like bitter defeat.
If so, how would the conspirators pull it off? Let's give this an honest look.
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To convincingly steal an election from the rightful winner, the thief would need to accomplish three things: Corrupt the pollsters, corrupt the media, and corrupt the vote itself.
Those nefarious, biased pollsters
"I don't believe the polls any more," Mr. Trump said this week. Those polls currently show Ms. Clinton ahead by more than six points, according to the RealClearPolitics aggregator. The Republican nominee is skeptical. "Believe me, folks, we're doing great," he told his followers, " if we keep our spirit, and if we go out and win …"
The American polls could be wrong, of course. There have been recent failures in Canada, where pollsters misread elections in both Alberta and British Columbia, and in Britain, where many pollsters wrongly predicted the Remain side would win the Brexit referendum, when Leave in fact prevailed.
But American presidential-election polls tend to be accurate, simply because there are so many of them, and they employ several different methodologies.
So there are three possibilities: The polls are accurate. Or the polls are inaccurate, as election night will reveal. Or shady Democratic operatives are bribing pollsters to torque their results in favour of Ms. Clinton, in hopes the polling prophesy becomes self-fulfilling.
And there is one outlier among the major pollsters. The USC Dornslife/Los Angeles Times tracking poll employs an unusual methodology in which a fixed panel of voters is repeatedly canvassed. That poll currently shows the two sides tied. Maybe that's because, as Nate Cohn of The New York Times believes, a single 19-year-old black male in Illinois who plans to vote for Mr. Trump, and whose vote is heavily overweighted in order to create a seemingly representative sample, is skewing the result.
Or maybe the people at USC/Dornslife simply refuse to cash the Democrats' cheque.
In any event, "an outcome at odds with the polls will simply be blamed on bad polling," Julia Clark, vice-president of U.S. Public Affairs at the research firm Ipsos, predicted in an interview.
Mind you, Ipsos has Ms. Clinton comfortably ahead of Mr. Trump, so who knows what's going on behind the scenes over there.
That nefarious, biased media
Mr. Trump also believes that "the the media is so dishonest and so corrupt, and the pile-on is so amazing" that their reporting has "poisoned the mind of the voters."
He's wrong. We're not corrupt; we were born this way.
That is, most major media outlets, including the Times, The Washington Post and most television networks tend to skew in favour of progressive attitudes. It could be the crusading tradition of the craft, or the progressive bias of faculty at journalism schools. But Mr. Trump has a point. Coverage of his campaign by the Lamestream Media has been heavily critical.
Of course, that doesn't explain the awkwardness of staunchly conservative newspapers, such as The Dallas Morning News and The Arizona Republic, and magazines such as The Weekly Standard and National Review, that have come out against the Republican candidate. Not a single editorial board in any major American newspaper has chosen to plump for Trump; some of those boards have refused to endorse a Republican presidential nominee for the first time since the Depression, or ever.
Is it the candidate's attitude to women, Mexicans, Muslims, the disabled and Vladimir Putin that has turned these conservative bastions against him, or is something more sinister at work?
Hard to tell.
Those nefarious, biased vote riggers
Finally, could the vote itself be corrupted? Project Veritas, a conservative advocacy group, has released a video in which Democratic operatives brag about fomenting trouble at Trump rallies, and about how, in the past, they smuggled out-of-state voters into a swing state, in hopes of influencing the result.
But in practice, voter fraud is a myth, says Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. Numerous studies over the past two decades have revealed "fewer than 20 recorded instances of it nationwide," he said in an interview. "It's part of American folklore."
Bottom line: "There are so many safeguards in place, it's impossible to rig a national election," he believes.
Making things even harder for any Democratic plumbers, the secretaries of state in the key battlegrounds of Ohio and Florida are Republican. "I can reassure Donald Trump: I am in charge of elections in Ohio, and they're not going to be rigged. I'll make sure of that," Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted told CNN. Getting Mr. Husted to look the other way while the Democrats stuff ballot boxes may take some effort.
There have long been stories – some no doubt apocryphal, some no doubt true – of construction crews blocking the entrances of certain precincts in past elections, and of fraudulent robocalls (not unlike those that were used to mislead voters in Guelph, Ont., in the 2011 Canadian election).
But such tactics are rare, unreliable and hard to keep secret, which is why a Conservative campaign worker, Michael Sona, went to jail for orchestrating the Guelph robocalls campaign.
***
And that's the thing about trying to rig an election. People talk. Voters complain. Reporters sniff around. If the Democrats were seeking to fix this one, weeks in advance, we'd be hearing about it from someone other than Mr. Trump, who has provided not a scintilla of evidence to back up his claims.
But maybe there is evidence, plenty of it, and you'd have heard about it long ago, if they hadn't bought the media's silence.
Who are they? Oh, you know who they are. We all know.
Don't we?
John Ibbitson