> I would argue, allowing election conspiracy theories to propagate is a necessary evil of a functioning democracy.
I think real-world experience has proven that this isn't true. I get the idea behind what you're saying but the US (and UK/Europe) has had pretty much a constant onslaught on election conspiracies at all levels of our democracy.
The outcome has not been to make our democracies better functioning.
What's the alternative? Every corrupt leader since Nero has called their opposition's true statements "conspiracy theories" or similar and suppressed their statements as such; or deliberately invented conspiracy theories about their opponents and declared the truth to be the conspiracy. You can look up speeches in which Fascist and Nazi leaders denounced the "conspiracy theories" against them, which were (at the time) actually "unfounded" despite turning out almost completely true. We didn't know about the true horrors of the Nazi death camps until after the war ended, despite the "conspiracy theories" running rampant and often violently suppressed.
The alternative is to, quite literally, allow someone to be an arbiter of the truth, and then suppress information they determine is not factual. To which I say, give me this power, and in 30 years, I will be an emperor.
The alternative is listening to the people running the elections at the grassroots level. They should be a mix of people representing various interests. There should also be international observers. If there is widespread fraud, the word will get out before the results. And you will hear about the fraud from everywhere, not just from a handful of weirdos or from top-level people of one of the parties.
Every sane electoral system starts from the assumption that the authorities responsible for the elections cannot be trusted. Instead of trusting the authorities, you trust a large number of people watching each other. Then everyone knows that if there is widespread fraud, it will be obvious, and hence the electoral system can be trusted.
The alternative is making it almost impossible to have corrupt leaders in the first place, through taking care of society and the people in it.
Strong local media, strong local politics, strong education systems, strong protections for whistleblowers, a healthy environment, clean water, good cheap food, affordable housing, quality entertainment - there are countries in the world where citizens have all of this. And they don't have "single arbiters of truth" managing it.
I think real-world experience has proven that this isn't true. I get the idea behind what you're saying but the US (and UK/Europe) has had pretty much a constant onslaught on election conspiracies at all levels of our democracy.
The outcome has not been to make our democracies better functioning.