Here's a scenario for election theft allegations that might pass for optimistic in a political environment as dysfunctional as our own: A few more years of this onslaught of bipartisan and demonstrably groundless accusations and the charge might cease to be a serious thing.
Crying "theft" might lose its power to inspire legislative agendas or Capitol riots and pass into the realm of metaphor. It might become our awful new hyperbole, a way to express intense frustration with electoral outcomes without making any substantive claim about actual voting tallies or practices. It could be a successor, perhaps, to our perennial (and perennially empty) threats to move to Canada, or an analogue to Iran's "death to America" chant, which sounds pretty grim to American ears but, in Iran, instead lands as a hyperbolic policy critique.
