And yet they found 6,000 plus more votes.

Pretty sure he thought all the votes were counted. I don't think he was lying, but he was expressing an opinion based on confidence not fact. I sense you were never an auditor during your career. I started my career as an auditor for Price Waterhouse and there is simply no way, someone at the level of the Secretary of State could know with certainty unless he had conducted a thorough audit whether all ballots were counted. And that audit had not been done at the time he made that statement.

What he was essentially saying is I trust my process (which had never been subjected to such a strain) and I believe no one inside the election process was intentionally manipulating the results.

But use your common sense, how could someone as far up in an organization know without having conduct audit procedures to be sure?

I think Trump believed and there is good reason for him to have believed, that many mail-in votes were fraudulent. Notice, what I am saying. There is good reason to believe, not that many mail-in vote were actually fraudulent.

If you have followed all the trials around the country over fraudulent mail in voting, you may or may not realize that for every case you catch, you miss many more. The kind of audits that have revealed fraud help expose the weaknesses in the system, they don't catch every fraudulent vote.

The three states Trump had the best case for flipping were Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona for different reasons. I am not one that believed Trump won the election and that it was stolen from him. But I also understand, that for most of my life, losing candidates have claimed fraud and in most cases, there is a reasonable basis to believe voter fraud occurred. Hillary claimed the Russians hacked our voting machines. And she told Biden, no matter what not to concede until a full audit was done.

But this goes to your point...

As the margin of victory increases, you move from the routine election fraud that occurs every election, which mostly is focused on local elections where far few votes are needed to "steal" an election, to more "systemic" fraud. The problem with "systemic" fraud is that it usually requires a lot more people to collude to pull off and the more people that get involved in a fraud, the more likely it is to be discovered.

Most people including Trump don't understand how fraud occurs or where the points of failure are. In 2020, the two primary points of failure were the inability to determine to what degree illegal vote harvesting occurred (some states like California have given up since adopting mail in voting and now allow vote harvesting).

Vote harvesting can be well intentioned and illegal at the same time. It comes down to something as simple as a campaign worker knocking on your door asking you if you plan to vote. You respond, you don't have time to go to the polls. And they offer to carry your completed ballot (which you fill out without coercion) and drop it off in ballot box. This is an amazingly effective tactic where it is legal and there is evidence it occurred in many states where it is not. But no one will ever know how significant the practice was and at one level, the ballot was not fraudulently filled out, just illegally conveyed.

The second point of vulnerability was the relaxed signature recognition parameters used to process the massive volume of mail in votes. Again, California that has been at this longer, has addressed the whole issue of what is referred to as "ballot curing" by saying rather than "curing ballots", simply mail them back to the voter and have them cure them.

We will never know the true outcome, but there is no evidence that the two significant vulnerabilities in the mail in election process altered the outcome. So, I am not claiming the 2020 election was stolen, I am saying Trump had reason to believe it could be stolen.

And that reason is enough. Walz had reason to resign from the military when he did. He wanted to run for Congress, but we will never know whether he also resigned because he did not want to serve in Iraq. I give him the benefit of the doubt as I do Trump, because that is how our country is designed. But in the media with Walz and in court with Trump, arguments have been made suggesting people need not know what someone was thinking, they can simply presume it. To me that is dangerous.